Effects of snow grain shape on climate simulations : sensitivity tests with the Norwegian Earth System Model

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: Räisänen, Petri, Makkonen, Risto, Kirkevag, Alf, Debernard, Jens B.
• Other Authors: Department of Physics
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH 2018
• Subjects: SEA-ICE; BIDIRECTIONAL REFLECTANCE; MULTIPLE-SCATTERING; SPECTRAL ALBEDO; ANTARCTIC SNOW; SURFACE-AREA; BLACK CARBON; ARCTIC SNOW; SOLAR LIGHT; DATA RECORD; 114 Physical sciences; Antarctic; Arctic; albedo; Antarc*; black carbon; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10138/230190

Snow consists of non-spherical grains of various shapes and sizes. Still, in radiative transfer calculations, snow grains are often treated as spherical. This also applies to the computation of snow albedo in the Snow, Ice, and Aerosol Radiation (SNICAR) model and in the Los Alamos sea ice model, version 4 (CICE4), both of which are employed in the Community Earth System Model and in the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM). In this study, we evaluate the effect of snow grain shape on climate simulated by NorESM in a slab ocean configuration of the model. An experiment with spherical snow grains (SPH) is compared with another (NONSPH) in which the snow shortwave single-scattering properties are based on a combination of three non-spherical snow grain shapes optimized using measurements of angular scattering by blowing snow. The key difference between these treatments is that the asymmetry parameter is smaller in the non-spherical case (0.77-0.78 in the visible region) than in the spherical case (similar to 0.89). Therefore, for the same effective snow grain size (or equivalently, the same specific projected area), the snow broadband albedo is higher when assuming non-spherical rather than spherical snow grains, typically by 0.02-0.03. Considering the spherical case as the baseline, this results in an instantaneous negative change in net shortwave radiation with a global-mean top-of-the-model value of ca. -0.22Wm(-2). Although this global-mean radiative effect is rather modest, the impacts on the climate simulated by NorESM are substantial. The global annual-mean 2m air temperature in NONSPH is 1.17K lower than in SPH, with substantially larger differences at high latitudes. The climatic response is amplified by strong snow and sea ice feedbacks. It is further demonstrated that the effect of snow grain shape could be largely offset by adjusting the snow grain size. When assuming non-spherical snow grains with the parameterized grain size increased by ca. 70 %, the climatic differences to the SPH experiment ...