Geography
Prof Tony Payne
BSc(Stir), PhD(Edin)
Professor of Glaciology
Research Fellow in Geographical Sciences
Contact
Office: F2, 12 Berkeley Square
Tel: +44 (0)117 3314156
Fax: +44 (0)117 9287878
Email: a.j.payne@bristol.ac.uk
Research interests
I am interested in the flow and dynamics of ice sheets, in particular those of Antarctica and Greenland. The main research tool that I use is numerical modelling, in which the equations describing the mass balance, stress regime and rheology of ice are solved on a 3-d. mesh. My early work was aim at understanding the growth and decay of the ice sheets during the most recent Ice Age. I became interested in flow instabilities within ice sheets that could lead to large-scale surges (an application being the Heinrich Layers found in North Atlantic sediment) and the formation of ice streams (rivers of fast-flowing ice embedded within the typically slow flow of an ice sheet).
More recently, my research has concentrated on how the present-day Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will respond to on-going climate change. This has involved work on modelling the dynamics of Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica, as well as its coupling to the ocean. I have also been involved in trying to understand the causes of the contemporary thinning of parts of the Greenland ice sheet.
I am a co-director of NERC National Centre for Earth Observation - Cryosphere theme (2008 onwards, formerly NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling 2001-2008). The theme's research aims to understand processes in the Earth's polar latitudes that may affect the Earth's albedo, polar atmosphere and ocean circulation, and global sea level. I am also involved with the Joint Weather & Climate Research Programme which aims to incorporate ice sheets into the climate models of the Met Office Hadley Centre.
I am a work package leader in the EU's FP7 ice2sea project, whose aim is to provide predictions of sea-level rise for the next 200 years; I coordinate the activities of the seven groups working on ice-sheet and glacier modelling. I was a Contributing Author to 3rd and 4th Assessment Reports of the IPCC, and am a Lead Author on the 5th Assessment Report chapter on ‘Sea Level Change’.
Selected publications
A.M. Le Brocq, Payne, AJ, Siegert, MJ & R. B. Alley . 'A subglacial water flow model for West Antarctica', Journal of Glaciology, 55, (pp. 879-888), 2009. 10.3189/002214309790152564
S.F. Price, Payne, AJ, G.A. Catania & T.A. Neumann. 'Seasonal acceleration of inland ice via along-flow coupling to marginal ice', Journal of Glaciology, 54, (pp. 213-219), 2008. 10.3189/002214308784886117
Sole, AJ, Payne, AJ, Bamber, JL, Nienow, P & Krabill, W. 'Testing hypotheses of the cause of peripheral thinning of the Greenland Ice Sheet: is land-terminating ice thinning at anomalously high rates?', The Cryopshere, 2, (pp. 205-218), 2008. 10.5194/tc-2-205-2008
Payne, AJ, Holland, PR, Shepherd, A, Rutt, IC, Jenkins, A & Joughin, I. 'Numerical modeling of ocean-ice interactions under Pine Island Bay's ice shelf', Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 112 (C10, C10019), (pp. 1-14), 2007. ISSN: 0148-0227 10.1029/2006JC003733