Deriving Accumulation From Above: Annual Accumulation Rates (2009-2017) in Southeast Greenland Using Airborne Snow Radar and Comparison With Regional Climate Models
Abstract
For two decades, Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) mass loss has been dominated by a decrease in surface mass balance (SMB), or the difference between snow accumulation and runoff. Accumulation rates in Southeast Greenland are critical to understand, as they can be high enough to partially offset increasing GrIS meltwater runoff. Here, we utilize the full available time series of NASA Operation Icebridge snow radar observations to derive annual accumulation in Southeast Greenland from 2009 to 2017. We compare the output of two regional climate models, MAR and RACMO2, and show that the models underestimate accumulation, especially along coastal Southeast Greenland. This underestimation is related to the models misplacing the maximum in orographic snowfall. Our new data set will serve as a legacy for OIB, the first mission to record airborne annual accumulation, and is useful to fill in temporal and spatial data gaps to better understand SMB in an area of sparse in-situ measurements.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.C43B..04M
- Keywords:
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- 3360 Remote sensing;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 0726 Ice sheets;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0750 Sea ice;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 4556 Sea level: variations and mean;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL