The snowdrift effect on snow deposition: insights from a comparison of a snow pit profile and meteorological observations

Abstract

A high-frequency and precise ultrasonic sounder was used to record precipitated/deposited snow and drift events over a 3 yr period (17 January 2005 to 4 January 2008) at the Eagle automatic weather station (AWS) site. Through a comparison of the meteorological data with snow pit chemical/isotopic dating results, the snowdrift process effect during snow accumulation was assessed. We believe that ice/firn cores are the most important proxies of climate and the environment because of their high resolution and their preservation of historical greenhouse gas levels, although their limitations and measurement uncertainties must be taken into account, due to the event-driven snow dominates the snow deposition. This study found a difference between two dating results of up to 12 months for a ~ 95 cm snow pit, where the annual snow accumulation rate is 30.3 cm. A weakness is also indicated when simulating the surface mass balance in Antarctica

A comparative study of changes in the Lambert Glacier/Amery Ice Shelf system, East Antarctica, during 2004–2008 using gravity and surface elevation observations

“…The coastal region had a high snow accumulation rate during the study period, as evidenced by the snow stake observations along the CHINARE expedition traverse and the reports of Ding and others (2011Ding and others ( , 2013Ding and others ( , 2015. As shown in Figure 6e, a concentrated area of significant elevation changes is located on the west side of the Amery ice shelf, and several similar but smaller areas are spread along the coast east of the ice shelf.…”

“…Although the in situ observations do not represent the entire study area, they do serve limited ground-truth purposes for comparison with the result from the ICESat data. The processing and analysis results of the complete in situ observations from 1997 to 2013, including surface mass balance and snowdrift effects on snow deposition, have been published by Ding and others (2011Ding and others ( , 2013Ding and others ( , 2015.…”