During the austral summer 2013-2014, an Adélie penguin colony near Dumont d'Urville (DDU) station, coastal Adélie Land, Antarctica, experienced a complete reproductive failure, a so-called "zero" year. Among the main reasons for this disaster was an unusual and dramatic rainfall event that occurred on January 1, 2014, and that was responsible for the death of all chicks, whose downy plumage has little waterproofing ability (Ropert-Coudert et al., 2015). According to ice-core records in which water from rainfall and melting manifests as clear frozen layers, two occurrences of heavy liquid precipitation and/or melt could be detected in the decade preceding 2014 in coastal Adélie Land (Goursaud et al., 2017).At a distance of about 1,500 km to the South-East, the Ross Ice Shelf underwent an extensive, intense, and prolonged surface melt event in January 2016 (Nicolas et al., 2017). Such an event was caused by a strong and sustained advection of warm oceanic air. During the first days of the event, rainfall significantly preconditioned the snowpack by increasing its temperature due to latent heat release from water freezing and hence, contributed to extend the melting. Such a phenomenon has been frequently observed over Greenland (Doyle et al., 2015) but is quite rare in Antarctica.The phase of Antarctic precipitation can directly impact the surface mass balance of the ice sheet through modulation of the surface albedo (Kirchgäßbner, 2011). Liquid precipitation can also accelerate the retreat
Abstract. CMIP5, CMIP6, and ERA5 Antarctic precipitation is evaluated against CloudSat data. At continental and regional scales, ERA5 and the median CMIP models are biased high, with insignificant improvement from CMIP5 to CMIP6. However, there are fewer positive outliers in CMIP6. AMIP configurations perform better than the coupled ones, and, surprisingly, relative errors in areas of complex topography are higher (up to 50 %) in the five higher-resolution models. The seasonal cycle is reproduced well by the median of the CMIP models, but not by ERA5. Progress from CMIP5 to CMIP6 being limited, there is still room for improvement.
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