Influence of wet conditions on snow temperature diurnal variations: An East Antarctic sea–ice case study

• Published in: Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography
• Main Authors: Lecomte, Olivier, Toyota, T.
• Other Authors: UCL - SST/ELI/ELIC - Earth & Climate
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Pergamon 2015
• Subjects: Snow; Sea ice; Temperature; Model; Antarctic; CISM:CECI; 1443; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/171218; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr2.2015.12.011

A one-dimensional snow–sea–ice model is used to simulate the evolution of temperature profiles in dry and wet snow over adiurnal cycle,at locations where associated observations collected during the Sea Ice Physics and Ecosystem experiment(SIPEX-II)are available. The model is used at two sites,corresponding to twoof the field campaign's sea–ice stations(2and6),and under two configurations: dry and wet snow conditions.In the wet snow modelsetups,liquid water may refreeze internally into the snow. At station 6,this releases laten theat to the snow and results in temperature changes at the base of the snow pack of a magnitude comparing to the model-observation difference ð1–2 1CÞ. As the temperature gradient across the snow is in turn weakened,the associated conductive heat flux through snow decreases. At station 2,internal refreezing also occurs but colder air temperatures and the competing process of strengthened heat conduction in snow concurrent to snow densification maintain a steady temperature profile. However,both situations sharea common feature and show that the conductive heat flux through the snow mays ignificantly be affected(by 10–20% in our simulations)as a result of the liquid water refreezing in snow, either through thermal conductivity enhancement or direct temperature gradient alteration.This ultimately gives motivation for further investigating the impacts of these processes on the sea–ice mass balance in the framework of global scale model simulations.