Datasets and protocols for including anomalous freshwater from melting ice sheets in climate simulations

Abstract. Anomalous freshwater fluxes from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and ice shelves are impacting the surrounding oceans and we need to be able to account for these effects in climate model simulations over the historical period and beyond. In previous phases of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), models mostly either assumed that the ice sheets were in mass balance, or that discharge from the ice sheets was constant, but in neither case was the observed increasing discharge properly accounted for. In this paper, we present an updateable dataset of absolute and anomalous freshwater mass fluxes from both ice sheets. These fluxes can be implemented in historical climate simulations as a forcing for models that do not (yet) include interactive ice sheets, or used to evaluate models that do. We also make recommendations for how climatological and anomalous fluxes can be implemented in climate models that may have different approaches to interactions with the ice sheets. These forcings are available for CMIP7 simulations and should lead to more robust and coherent simulation of sea surface temperature, sea ice and regional sea level trends in the recent historical period, and improve the credibility of projections.