https://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/As at 2 August 2018Commentary mostly unchanged again.
When melt is high, precipitation seems also mostly above average. When melt is low, precipitation is often higher than average, but not by much. SMB was supposed to be on the decline since the beginning of June. Apart from one, maybe two days, SMB decline has been persistently below average. As a result, current SMB looks like it is now more than 150 GT above the 30 year average.
The large melt that started on Monday has continued (47% on Thursday, highest for year to date), with one day of less precipitation - that did change things a bit - making two days since June 1 where SMB loss was above average. Precipitation is back up, SMB loss well below average again.
In contrast, although last year the story was also about SMB increasing well above average. it was for a totally different reason - last year being from large winter and spring snow fall.
On average there are now, on average, only about 15 days left for the Greenland SMB to reduce (i.e. melt). Of course, there may be surprises to come.
ps:- I missed NSIDC's mid-season update on
https://nsidc.org/greenland-today/. Two things-
- NSIDC uses the same measure for the melt percentage - anything more than one millimetre of depth loss,
- the NSIDC model is coming up with a far higher estimate of above average SMB gain for this year than DMI (around 200+GT above average compared with DMI's 130 Gt at the beginning of July).