Multimillion-dollar grant will help UB project ice sheet loss and sea level rise

BUFFALO, N.Y. — How much sea level rise will coastal communities have to contend with by the end of the century, and beyond?

Melt from the Earth’s ice sheets is already contributing to flooding throughout the U.S., and globally, and is expected to increase in the coming decades. Adaptation to reduce the destructiveness of future ocean floods is underway and depends critically, inch by inch, on the work of a newly funded, international group of polar scientists.

University at Buffalo researchers will contribute to this effort through the development of the latest computer simulations to map out the most plausible outcomes, thanks to a new multimillion-dollar grant.

The Heising-Simons Foundation has awarded $2.1 million to support the work of Sophie Nowicki, PhD, Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, within the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

In addition, Timothy Bartholomaus, PhD, associate professor in the University of Idaho Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences, and Hélène Seroussi, PhD, associate professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, have both received $1.45 million grants for their work.

The $5 million total will allow Nowicki and collaborators to move forward with the next phase of the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project, a first-of-its-kind international effort to project how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to sea level rise all the way to 2300. This new ice sheet model project is part of phase 7 of the World Climate Research Programme’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7) and is referred to by its acronym, ISMIP7. 

“Modeling of ice sheets and glaciers is one of the best ways that we can understand how much sea level rise we need to prepare for in the coming decades to centuries,” says Nowicki, who serves as ISMIP7 co-chair. “This is a matter of national security in the United States, but also a global challenge for planning and adaptation to rising sea level.”

The first iteration, ISMIP6, lasted approximately a decade and resulted in 33 published studies and counting, including a 2021 study in Nature that found that the melting of ice could be halved this century if the world meets the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

ISMIP6 was supported by UB’s Center for Computational Research (CCR), which provided resources for data storage and sharing. 

The projections of ice sheet melt from ISMIP6 and their contributions to global sea level rise were adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and featured prominently in its 6th Assessment Report. Now, CMIP7 has officially tasked ISMIP7 to produce projections for the next IPCC assessment report.

Consisting of over 100 scientists worldwide working with 37 different models, the newly-funded ISMIP7 will bring together ice sheet modelers with experts in disciplines that span the atmosphere, cryosphere, ocean and solid Earth.

“Although considered a great success, there are many aspects that we wanted to improve during our last collaboration, and this grant makes it possible to review every aspect of our protocol so that we can improve the projections that we will deliver to stakeholders,” Nowicki says. 

The Heising-Simons Foundation’s grants to UB, the University of Idaho and Dartmouth College will fund core activities of ISMIP7 that the entire project will benefit from, including the design of the protocol that participating models will follow and preparing the associated datasets needed for these projections. The grants also sponsor annual meetings and conferences, as well as computing capabilities.

Nowicki’s team will oversee ISMIP7’s overall project management and coordination, data processing, data publishing, as well as creating novel observations for use by ice sheet models and work related to Antarctica surface mass balance. The team includes Beata Csatho, PhD, professor in the UB Department of Earth Sciences, who co-leads an ISMIP7 focus group focused on the use of observations of ice sheet change. 

“With the advent of satellite remote sensing technology, we can now characterize ice sheet changes and processes with remarkable detail. Ice sheet observations, such as ice velocity, thickness and mass change, are crucial for ISMIP7, as they are used to initialize, calibrate, and validate the ice sheet model ensembles,” Csatho explains. “Our observational focus group addresses the needs of ice sheet modelers by identifying and standardizing observational data sets that are the best suited for improving sea level projections.”

The main goal of ISMIP7 is to deliver projections that can inform policy making and public spending, particularly for coastal communities vulnerable to sea level rise.

“Coastal planners are increasingly reaching out to the ISMIP community to understand ice sheet projections and the uncertainty in sea level,” Nowicki says. “A change in projections of even 15 centimeters, well within the uncertainty of our projections, can have a serious impact on their choices regarding disaster preparedness and infrastructure planning.”