Thanks for the Neff reference. Neff has been looking at the effect of atmospheric rivers on greenland forawhile, eg
doi: 10.1002/2014JD021470
which i believe i have discussed before.
The latest Neff article is a precis of the results of Mattingly et al. (Fettweis is an author)
doi:10.1029/2018JD028714
on the impact of atmospheric rivers on greenland ice over the period 1980-2016. The latter, among other things, use a self organizing map classifier to identify these phenomena. They find, unsurprisingly that the effect is spatially and seasonally diverse, but that surface mass balance is adversely affected.
"Furthermore, our investigation of the short- and long-term relationships between moisture transport events and modeled GrIS surface properties proves that this correspondence between the years of enhanced AR activity and anomalous GrIS mass loss is not a coincidence. Strong AR impacts cause increased melt in all areas of the GrIS and decreased SMB in the ablation zone during summer, and warm seasons with above-average GrIS melt extent are characterized by anomalously strong moisture transport by ARs over Greenland. ARs typically result in SMB gains in the GrIS ablation zone during nonsummer seasons and in the accumulation zone during all seasons. However, the intense summer SMB losses in the ablation zone during years of enhanced moisture transport outweigh the positive AR contributions to SMB in other regions and seasons. The scaling of melt versus snowfall in Figures 9 and 11 shows that the magnitude of mass loss from summer melt in the ablation zone has a much greater upper limit than mass gain from snowfall."
I attach figure 9.
sidd