Freshwater transport over the East Greenland Shelf

We assess the contribution of flow on the East Greenland Shelf (west of 6.5°W) to the total freshwater transport through the Fram Strait. We analyse all the available observations from the East Greenland Shelf consisting of summer hydrographic sections (July to September) and mooring deployments between 2013-2021 including a new mooring at 10.12°W. We find that in summer, the long term mean FWT cumulates to zero west of 10.6°W, in agreement with earlier results from hydrography, while between 10.6°W and 6.5°W it cumulates to a southward flow of 36.5 mSv. Of this, about 24.7 occurs west of 8°W and is thus not captured by the mooring-based estimate which is limited east of 8°W. One year of mooring data (2020-2021) including the new mooring at ~ 10°W showed a large seasonal cycle between 10-6.5°W ranging from 13.4 mSv in summer (July to September) to 66.4 mSv in winter (January to March) with one-year average of 35.9 mSv. We also include remote-sensing products and model results to estimate the seasonality over the shelf and find that the southward freshwater transport can be significantly larger in winter months, more than 50 mSv larger than in summer, however, the results from these different datasets deviate from each other and uncertainty is large.