The weather reports you watch on TV come from people who take measurements of today’s weather, and then let computers predict how it is going to change in the next few days. I do the same thing for the Juneau ice field, which is a large glacier next to Alaska’s capital of Juneau. I feed the results of the measurements into the computer, and the computer model tells me how fast the Juneau ice field is going to shrink in the next 100 years.
When we know the future of Juneau ice field better, we can better predict how fast its neighbors are going to shrink, and therefore how much they are all going to contribute to global sea level rise. This helps the authorities in coastal planning, which may need to include determining how high dykes need to be in the future to withstand the rising oceans.
– Florian, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, USA