Emmy Noether Young Investigator Group SNOWflAke

SNOWflAke (Learning from local snow properties for large-scale Antarctic ice pack volume) aims to investigate how the snow cover on Antarctic sea ice responds to changing atmospheric conditions, affecting the sea ice mass balance by inducing snow-albedo feedbacks that accelerate sea ice melt and retreat. 

Combining observations, model development and evaluation, this research will significantly improve our process understanding of Antarctic sea ice in the Southern Ocean climate system – from today’s perspective and for future warming climate scenarios.

Snow depth on sea ice is an essential climate variable, as it dominates the energy and momentum exchanges across the atmosphere-ice-ocean interfaces and actively contributes to the sea ice mass balance. The Antarctic sea ice is characterized by a year-round snow cover preventing surface melt in summer, and amplifying sea ice growth through extensive snow-to-ice conversion processes. The lack of knowledge on both snow depth and the complex seasonal stratigraphy causes substantial uncertainties in large-scale data products from satellite remote sensing. Also, the accurate representation of these small-scale processes within the snowpack in numerical models, in particular in climate models remains a major challenge. This leads to essential uncertainties in the Antarctic sea ice energy and mass budgets as outlined in the IPCC “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”.

Within the project, we will therefore test the hypothesis that seasonal variations of snowpack properties on Antarctic sea ice are sensitive indicators for changing atmospheric forcing as they could trigger snow-albedo feedbacks that accelerate sea ice melting and retreat. This hypothesis is important as snow has so far contributed to a positive Antarctic sea ice mass balance due to widespread snow-to-ice conversion processes. The present climate warming might reverse this evolution and lead to increased surface melting, as currently prevalent for Arctic sea ice feedbacks for the Earths’ climate.