A century of climate variability and climate gradients from coast to ice sheet in West Greenland

This work describes the temperature trends of the Nuuk fjord area during the last century and analyses the spatial variability of temperature and precipitation along the coast-inland gradient of the region. A better understanding of the climate of the coastal region of Greenland is important for ice sheet studies since significant thinning has recently been detected on local outlet glaciers with driving factors still to be identified. The glaciological reconstruction of the ice sheet mass balance has often made use of climate datasets from the coastal stations to substitute missing data from the inland areas. The information on the coast-inland gradient of temperature and precipitation hereafter provided is of relevance in other areas around the ice sheet as it represents a mean for increasing the accuracy of historical glacier-climate interactions. We therefore discuss climatological information from the automatic station that operated at the glacier throughout the 1980s as well as from other stations located along the fjord and with a longer coverage.