Brice Noël: Predicting the future of glacier melt and its impact on rising sea levels

Brice Noël, PhD in Polar Climatology, has been awarded a F.R.S-FNRS Research Associate contract to pursue his project that aims at developing an atlas of the world’s polar ice sheets and glaciers melting at high spatial resolution. Combining innovative techniques and a multidisciplinary approach, this project promises to yield crucial data for understanding and anticipating the response of glaciers to global warming. 

T

he Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are among the largest freshwater reservoirs on Earth. Totally melted, the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea levels by seven meters, while Antarctica would contribute an extra fifty-eight meters, directly threatening inhabited coastal areas worldwide. As for mountain glaciers, their rapid disappearance would affect local ecosystems, as well as millions of people depending on meltwater for irrigation, electricity generation and other industrial uses.

To date, climate models are commonly used to predict the melting of polar ice sheets and glaciers, but they generally operate at a relatively low spatial resolution (typically 5 to 100 km). Although these models provide global information, they do not accurately capture small-scale phenomena, such as the strong and rapid melting of small glaciers.

Entitled "High-resolution Atlas of contemporary and future land ice surface mass balance", Brice Noël's project stands out for its innovative approach, combining several cutting-edge techniques to improve the representation of glacier melting. It couples global and regional climate models (including the MAR model developed at ULiège), and a statistical downscaling technique that he has developed, to estimate glacier melt at an unprecedented spatial resolution of 500 meters. This breakthrough enables a finer representation of small glaciers, where global warming triggers disproportionate impacts," explains the researcher. This method is crucial to improve projections of the glacier melt contribution to sea-level rise.

This research is part of an ambitious scientific project aimed at reducing the uncertainties in climate projections, accounting for glaciers of all sizes, i.e., not just the large polar ice sheets. The results obtained will be essential for international efforts such as IMBIE (Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise) and ISMIP (Ice Sheet Model Inter-comparison Project), which provide robust estimates of current and future glacier mass loss to inform IPCC reports on climate change. These reports, in turn, inform policymakers and governments on the actions to be taken to mitigate, and adapt to, the impacts of climate change.

“This method is not only applicable to the polar regions," adds Brice Noël, "it can also be used in Europe, and more particularly in Belgium, to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts, such as the representation of rainfall at a resolution of 100 meters, i.e., at the scale of an agricultural plot." Applying climate modeling at very fine scales could have a direct impact on agriculture, water management and other sectors requiring local climate projections.

Brice Noël's project is part of the research line on climate change that aims at precisely quantifying the contribution of melting polar ice sheets and glaciers to sea-level rise in the long term, under different warming scenarios projected to 2300.

About Brice Noël

Brice Noël began his academic career at the University of Liège, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in geography and a master's degree in climatology. His passion for polar climatology was sparked by the effects of global warming depicted in films such as The Day After Tomorrow and Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The latter had a particularly significant impact on his decision to specialize in the study of glaciers and ice sheets.

After completing his master’s degree, Brice Noël began a PhD in polar climatology at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (IMAU), where he used high-resolution climate models to study mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic glaciers. He then continued his research with two postdocs at IMAU, one of which was funded by a prestigious NWO Veni fellowship. In 2022, he returns to ULiège as an FNRS research fellow, during which time he developed his current project on glacier melt. In 2024, he embarks on a new stage in his career by obtaining a mandate as an FNRS Research Associate.