Abstract

The Antarctic Plateau, characterized by cold and dry weather conditions with very little precipitation, is mostly covered by snow at the surface. This paper describes an intercomparison of snow models, of varying complexity, used for numerical weather prediction or academic research. The results of offline numerical simulations, carried out during 15 days in 2009, show that the simplest models are able to reproduce the surface temperature as well as the most complex models provided that their surface parameters are well chosen. Furthermore, it is shown that the diversity of the surface parameters of the models strongly impacts the numerical simulations, in particular the temporal variability of the surface temperature and the components of the surface energy balance. The models tend to overestimate the surface temperature by 2–5 K at night and underestimate it by 2 K during the day. The observed and simulated turbulent latent heat fluxes are small, of the order of a few W m−2, with a tendency to underestimate, while the sensible heat fluxes are in general too intense at night as well as during the day. Finally, it is shown that the most complex multi-layer models are able to reproduce well the propagation of the daily diurnal wave, and that the snow temperature profiles in the snowpack are very close to the measurements carried out on site.

Highlights

  • This paper describes an intercomparison of snow models, of varying complexity, used for numerical weather prediction or academic research

  • 275 This section aims to show the variability of the surface parameters of the different models, and how they evolve during the simulation, when they are not fixed, as is the case, for example, for the surface broadband albedo

  • 4 Concluding remarks 480 The study showed that the simple models performed well as long as the surface albedo and heat capacity were well prescribed

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Summary

15 Abstract

The Antarctic Plateau, characterized by cold and dry weather conditions with very little precipitation, is mostly covered by snow at the surface. This paper describes an intercomparison of snow models, of varying complexity, used for numerical weather prediction or academic research. The results of offline numerical simulations, carried out during 15 days in 2009, show that the simplest models are able to reproduce the surface temperature as well as the most complex models provided that their surface parameters are well chosen. The models tend to overestimate the surface temperature by 2-5 K at night and underestimate it by 2 K during the day. The observed and simulated turbulent latent heat fluxes are small, of the order of a few W m-2, with a tendency to underestimate, while the sensible heat fluxes are in general too intense at night as well as during the day. It is shown that the most complex multi-layer models are able to reproduce well the propagation of the daily. 25 diurnal wave, and that the snow temperature profiles in the snowpack are very close to the measurements carried out on site

Introduction
Models
Simulation protocol
Forcing data
Variability of surface parameters
D95 IES EBA CHTESSEL NOAH CLM4 JULES
565 References
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