Blowing Snow at McMurdo Station, Antarctica During the AWARE Field Campaign: Multi‐Instrument Observations of Blowing Snow

Abstract

aiming to investigate cryospheric loss in Western Antarctica. McMurdo Station on Ross Island (77°51′S, 166°40′E) was the central facility for the project, with an additional mobile facility deployed at the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (79°28′S, 112°5′W) during the summer (Lubin et al., 2020). The full ARM Mobile Facility (AMF2) was deployed to McMurdo Station for all of 2016. Observations from AWARE provide a unique data set to investigate the occurrence and properties of blowing snow (BLSN). For a summary of the importance of this process in Antarctica, the reader is referred to the first paper in this series, Loeb and Kennedy (2021).Previously, Loeb and Kennedy (2021) developed a climatology of BLSN at McMurdo Station using human observations, estimating that BLSN occurred 7.4% of the time during the campaign. This climatology was then compared to ceilometer and surface-based instrumentation deployed during AWARE. While BLSN could be detected effectively, estimations of BLSN layer depth were more uncertain. There are a variety of reasons why knowing BLSN depth is important. Depth of the layer can influence the surface radiation budget by increasing the absorption and emission of longwave radiation (Yang et al., 2014). In environments where there are significant temperature gradients, this can lead to large changes in longwave fluxes. found that as BLSN occurs, the temperature of the layer increases and becomes nearly isothermal due to the mechanical mixing of air into the layer from above the inversion and absorption of longwave radiation. These processes are also tied to the amount of sublimation that occurs, which in turn cools and moistens the boundary layer (Bintanja, 2001;Déry & Taylor, 1996).