Surface meteorology and tropospheric cloud near Ross Island in Antarctica.

• Main Author: Jolly, Ben
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: University of Canterbury 2016
• Subjects: Austral; New Zealand; Ross Ice Shelf; Ross Island; Ross Sea; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Shelf
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/13280; https://doi.org/10.26021/7428

This thesis presents a series of studies into cloud and surface weather conditions present near Ross Island in Antarctica to investigate local-scale meteorology in the area and explore connections with larger scale atmospheric processes. Technical work on the development of specialist, low-cost, portable weather stations (SNOWWEB) is described with results and corresponding analyses from two successful field seasons presented. Covering the Austral summers of 2013/14 and 2014/15, both deployments utilized 15 to 20 weather stations over areas in the order of hundreds of square kilometers. A third-party classification product derived from surface-level winds in ERAInterim is used to provide synoptic context for these deployments and link results to an analysis of the combined radar (CloudSat) and lidar (CALIPSO) cloud product over the Ross Ice Shelf and southern Ross Sea. Located at the north-western corner of the Ross Ice Shelf - due south of New Zealand - the topography around Ross Island is complex and substantial. This creates associated complex interactions with air flow in the region, particularly near the surface, as winds flowing north over the large and featureless ice shelf encounter the terrain. A large-scale network of automated weather stations (AWS) exists over the greater Ross Ice Shelf area with good coverage for mesoscale studies, however logistical constraints limit the number that can be deployed and maintained with a paucity of observations at the local scale. SNOWWEB is a system of low-cost weather stations easy to transport and very quick to deploy designed to augment existing AWS observations. Substantial technical development of SNOWWEB occurred during the course of this thesis, with improvements to physical design and wireless networking capabilities presented. SNOWWEB observations were found to match well with those from nearby existing AWS during two summer season deployments near Ross Island, with results from the network as a whole showing coherent spatial structure in wind, ...