Mass Balance and Climate of the Ablation Zone of the Taylor Glacier, Antarctica

We explore the relationships between climate and ablation on the Taylor Glacier on hourly to annual timescales. A simple physically-based model that predicts ablation from weather station measurements on the Taylor Glacier, Antarctica is presented along with ablation measurements at about 250 ablation stakes. Case studies of low, median, and high ablation events are presented. Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer imagery and NOAA-NCEP Reanalysis data are included in the analysis to give the broader context of the weather station measurements and to help connect the local scale of weather station measurements to the broader scale of climate model output. A novel method of visualizing these disparate data is also demonstrated.