Coupling between the atmospheric circulation and extremes of the mass balance of Storglaciären, northern Scandinavia

A large amount of glacier mass-balance data has been gathered during the last few decades. One of the ultimate goals with these data is to reveal changes in climate, recorded by the sensitive climatic gauges that glaciers are. How can we use the collected mass-balance data to retrieve knowledge of changes in climate and in the atmospheric circulation? One method is to examine the extremes of the summer and winter balance years from a glacier or a glaciated area, and from these reconstruct the mean synoptic situation for those years. We focus here on the long 50 year continuous mass-balance record from Storglaciären, northern Scandinavia, and analyze the extreme events in the data set. The results show that high net balance is favoured by stronger westerly air flow (more maritime influence) which increases accumulation in winter but reduces ablation in summer.