From ice core to ground-penetrating radar: representativeness of SMB at three ice rises along the Princess Ragnhild Coast, East Antarctica
(2022) Journal of Glaciology — Vol. 68, n° 272, p. 1221-1233 (2022)
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Cavitte, Marie G.P. 
- Abstract
- The future contributions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to sea level rise will depend on the evolution of its surface mass balance (SMB), which could amplify/dampen mass losses increasingly observed at the ice sheet's edge. In situ constraints of SMB over annual-to-decadal timescales consist mostly of firn/ice cores that have a surface footprint cm. SMB constraints also come from climate models, which have a higher temporal resolution but a larger surface footprint of several km. We use ice-penetrating radar data to obtain an intermediate spatial and temporal resolution SMB record over three ice rises along the Princess Ragnhild Coast. The co-located ice cores allow us to obtain absolute radar-derived SMB rates at a multi-annual-to-decadal temporal resolution. By comparing the ice core SMB measurements and the radar-derived SMB records, we determine that pointwise measurements of SMB are representative of a small surface area, m radius extending from the ice core drill site for the ice rises studied here, and that the pointwise measurements are systematically 7–15 cm w.e. a lower than the mean SMB value calculated for the whole ice rises. However, ice core records are representative of an entire ice rise's temporal variability at the temporal resolution examined.
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Cavitte, M. G. P., Goosse, H., Wauthy, S., Kausch, T., Tison, J.-L., Van Liefferinge, B., Pattyn, F., Lenaerts, J. T. M., & Claeys, P. (2022). From ice core to ground-penetrating radar: representativeness of SMB at three ice rises along the Princess Ragnhild Coast, East Antarctica. Journal of Glaciology, 68(272), 1221-1233. https://doi.org/10.1017/jog.2022.39 (Original work published 2022)