Snowfall and precipitation phase climatologies for the Greenland Ice Sheet (2006-2016) from CloudSat's cloud-profiling radar

• Main Authors: Ryan, Jonathan C, Smith, Laurence C, Wu, Mengxi, Cooley, Sarah W, Miège, Clement, Montgomery, Lynn, Koenig, Lora S, Fettweis, Xavier, Noël, Brice P Y, van den Broeke, Michiel R
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2020
• Subjects: CloudSat; Greenland; Greenland_Ice; Greenland ice sheet; precipitation; snowfall; Ice Sheet; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.911416; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.911416

This dataset contains Greenland Ice Sheet snowfall climatologies derived from Release 5, Version P1 of the CloudSat snowfall product (2C-SNOW-PROFILE: http://www.cloudsat.cira.colostate.edu/data-products/level-2c/2c-snow-profile). Before gridding, we applied a filter to the 2C-SNOW-PROFILE product which excluded all snowfall rates that were greater than two standard deviations from a 50 km running median. Snowfall climatologies were produced by (1) averaging all valid CloudSat snowfall rate observations within 45 km of the grid cell center, (2) averaging these snowfall rates for each month, and (3) averaging all months to produce a snowfall climatology for the 2006-2016 study period. We also produced seasonal snowfall climatologies by averaging monthly snowfall rates from the following periods (e.g. Spring [MAM], Summer [JJA], Autumn [SON], and Winter [DJF]). The snowfall climatologies have a WGS84 / NSIDC Sea Ice Polar Stereographic North projection (EPSG:3413) with a spatial resolution of 15 x 15 km. Snowfall rate units are in meters per year. This dataset also contains a Greenland Ice Sheet summer precipitation phase climatology for the 2006-2016 study period which was produced from Release 5, Version P1 of the CloudSat precipitation product (2C-PRECIP-COLUMN: http://www.cloudsat.cira.colostate.edu/data-products/level-2c/2c-precip-column). This climatology was derived using the same sampling strategy as the snowfall climatologies but was produced by dividing the number of events classified as rain by the total number of precipitation events.