Freshwater: freshwater fluxes of the ice sheets
Freshwater flux and mass anomaly series of the ice sheets by region. Freshwater is a records dataset (non-gridded data, see Records): its products, defined in Freshwater/records.toml, are prepared files in the form of the CF discrete sampling geometries, written to $FESMDATA_PRODUCTS/Records/Freshwater/Freshwater-<product>.nc.
Products
From Schmidt et al. (2025), doi:10.5281/zenodo.17386710, one product per series file (see Schmidt2025_fwf):
| Product | Variables (by region) | Time |
|---|---|---|
Freshwater-Schmidt2025_GL_discharge |
discharge, discharge_sd (Gt yr-1) |
annual, 1840-2025 |
Freshwater-Schmidt2025_GL_runoff |
surface_runoff_from_ice, surface_runoff_from_land, subglacial_discharge_from_ice, subglacial_discharge_from_land (m3 s-1), min_discharge_depth (m) |
monthly, 1950-2022 |
Freshwater-Schmidt2025_GL_mass_anomaly |
SMB_ROI, D_ROI, MB_ROI, their anomalies *_anom, SMB_ROI_sd, D_ROI_sd, and the total MB (Gt yr-1) |
annual, 1850-2024 |
Freshwater-Schmidt2025_AQ_calving |
calving, anomaly, calving_sd, baseline (Gt yr-1) |
annual, 1997-2021 |
Freshwater-Schmidt2025_AQ_subshelf_melt |
melt, anomaly, baseline (Gt yr-1), injection_depth_min, injection_depth_max (m) |
annual, 1991-2021 |
Freshwater-Schmidt2025_AQ_grounded_mass_change |
grounded_dm (Gt yr-1) |
annual, 2002-2023 |
Freshwater-Schmidt2025_AQ_mass_anomaly |
calve, subshelf_melt, grounded_loss, MB_ROI_anom (Gt yr-1) |
annual, 1990-2023 |
The series are by region (featureType timeSeries, dimensions time and region): 7 regions in Greenland (CE, CW, NE, NO, NW, SE, SW) and 18 in Antarctica (A-Ap, …, K-A). region is the region number, the basin id of the Regions basin set Schmidt2025 (<GRID>_BASINS-Schmidt2025.nc, see Regions), so that a series can be put on the grid of a domain; region_name is its name, and lat, lon the centroid of the region. time is in days since 1800-01-01, the middle of each year or month, with time_bnds.
The normalised iceberg melt climatologies of the record (GL_iceberg_melt.nc, AQ_iceberg_melt.nc) are gridded (0.5° lon-lat) and left out: they are for ocean models, which remap them onto their own grids.
Licences
| Source | Licence |
|---|---|
| Schmidt et al. (2025) | CC BY 4.0 (Zenodo) |
Making the dataset
julia fesmdata.jl record Freshwaterprepares the missing sources (<Source>/prepare.jl), checks the prepared files and copies them to $FESMDATA_PRODUCTS/Records/Freshwater/ (--overwrite to replace them).
Downloads
Download the files with fesmdata.jl into $FESMDATA_PRODUCTS/<Domain>/<GRID>/ (see Download), or one by one from the links below. All released datasets are listed under Products.
Version 2.1.0 (2026-10-15, packages). 14 files, 1.6 MB.
julia fesmdata.jl fetch Freshwater Records
Freshwater 14 files, 1.6 MB
Figures
Schmidt2025_AQ_calving
Schmidt2025_AQ_grounded_mass_change
Schmidt2025_AQ_mass_anomaly
Schmidt2025_AQ_subshelf_melt
Schmidt2025_GL_discharge
Schmidt2025_GL_mass_anomaly
Schmidt2025_GL_runoff
