Brief communication: Annual variability of the atmospheric circulation at large spatial scale reconstructed from a data assimilation framework cannot explain local East Antarctic ice rises' surface mass balance records
Cavitte, Marie G. P.; Goosse, Hugues; Dalaiden, Quentinet al.
Antarctica; snow; wind; surface mass balance; ice core
Abstract :
[en] Abstract. Ice cores are influenced by local processes that alter surface mass balance (SMB) records. To evaluate whether atmospheric circulation on large spatial scales explains the differing SMB trends at eight East Antarctic ice rises, we assimilated ice core SMB records within a high-resolution downscaled atmospheric model, while incorporating radar-derived SMB constraints to quantify local observation errors. The reconstruction captures the diverse variability from SMB records but may over-fit by introducing unrealistic wind spatial heterogeneity. While local errors are quantified, they might not cover all uncertainties. Moreover, small-scale wind circulation, unresolved in the reconstruction, could significantly affect local ice core SMB signals.
Brief communication: Annual variability of the atmospheric circulation at large spatial scale reconstructed from a data assimilation framework cannot explain local East Antarctic ice rises' surface mass balance records
East Antarctic surface mass balance in the Anthropocene: observations and multiscale modelling (Mass2Ant)
Funders :
BELSPO - Belgian Science Policy Office
Funding number :
BR/165/A2/Mass2ant
Funding text :
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those involved in data collection, ice core and radar data processing under the Mass2Ant and MADICE projects upon which this study relies. Marie Cavitte and Quentin Dalaiden were postdoctoral researchers of the FRS-FNRS (Belgium) for the duration of the study. Hugues Goosse is a research director within the FRS-FNRS. Nicolas Ghilain is funded by the Belgian Science Policy through the Fed-tWin program. Computational resources were provided by the supercomputing facilities of the Université catholique de Louvain (CISM/UCL) and the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif en Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles (CÉCI), funded by Fond de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS) under convention 2.5020.11 and by the Walloon Region. Finally, we would like to thank the Editor Reinhard Drews for his encouragement and the Reviewers for their constructive reviews and helpful comments which made this paper much stronger.
Financial support
This research has been supported by the Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique – FNRS, the Belgian Research Action through Interdisciplinary Networks (BRAIN.be) from the Belgian Science Policy Office in the framework of the “East Antarctic surface mass balance in the Anthropocene: observations and multiscale modelling (Mass2Ant)” project (contract no. BR/165/A2/Mass2Ant), the India-Norway MADICE project from the Ministry of Earth Sciences, India (Grant No. MoES/Indo-Nor/PS-3/2015). QD also received support from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 101149188.
