Drifting snow climate of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets

Abstract

This study presents the drifting snow climate of the Earth's ice sheets, Antarctica and Greenland. For that purpose we use a regional atmospheric climate model, RACMO2. We included a routine that is able to calculate the drifting snow fluxes and accounts for the interaction between drifting snow on the one hand and the atmosphere and snow surface on the other. RACMO2 is run at 27 km resolution for Antarctica, and 11 km resolution for Greenland, and forced at its lateral boundaries by ECMWF reanalyses (32 years for Antarctica and 52 years for Greenland). Because direct evaluation for drifting snow is challenging due to sparseness of observational data, we focussed the model evaluation on the ability of RACMO2 to represent near-surface wind climate, temperature, surface mass balance, the extent of ablation areas and remote-sensed drifting snow frequency. We show that RACMO2 is very well able to represent the present-day near-surface climate of Antarctica and Greenland. Drifting snow occurs 20-80% of the time on Antarctica, depending on the local wind climate. Highest frequencies are found in the coastal areas, where drifting snow sublimation (SUds) removes up to 150 mm water equivalent of snow, whereas the high-elevation areas experience little or no SUds. Drifting snow erosion (ER­ds) can be negative (deposition) or positive (erosion), and varies generally between -50 and 50 mm in regions where the wind field convergences and diverges, respectively. Integrated over the ice sheet, SUds removes around 165 Gt of snow, which is equivalent to ~6% of the precipitated snow. The impact of ER­ds on the Antarctic ice sheet SMB is negligible . We found several feedbacks between SUds and the atmosphere. SUds moistens the near-surface atmosphere, limiting its own potential, but also enhancing precipitation in some coastal areas. By removing mass from the snow surface, drifting snow processes increase the top snow layer density, increasing the threshold wind speed for further drifting snow. Since the impacts of drifting snow are included, we are able to quantify all contributors to the Antarctic SMB. The SMB equals 2479 +/- 147 Gt/yr, and is largely determined by snowfall. It varies from