An up‐to‐date quality‐controlled surface mass balance data set for the 90°–180°E Antarctica sector and 1950–2005 period

Abstract

[1] On the basis of thousands of surface mass balance (SMB) field measurements over the entire Antarctic ice sheet it is currently estimated that more than 2 Gt of ice accumulate each year at the surface of Antarctica. However, these estimates suffer from large uncertainties. Various problems affect Antarctic SMB measurements, in particular, limited or unwarranted spatial and temporal representativeness, measurement inaccuracy, and lack of quality control. We define quality criteria on the basis of (1) an up-to-date review and quality rating of the various SMB measurement methods and (2) essential information (location, dates of measurements, time period covered by the SMB values, and primary data sources) related to each SMB data. We apply these criteria to available SMB values from Queen Mary to Victoria lands (90°-180°E Antarctic sector) from the early 1950s to present. This results in a new set of observed SMB values for the 1950-2005 time period with strong reduction in density and coverage but also expectedly reduced inaccuracies and uncertainties compared to other compilations. The quality-controlled SMB data set also contains new results from recent field campaigns (International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE), Russian Antarctic Expedition (RAE), and Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) projects) which comply with the defined quality criteria. A comparative evaluation of climate model results against the quality-controlled updated SMB data set and other widely used ones illustrates that such Antarctic SMB studies are significantly affected by the quality of field SMB values used as reference.Citation: Magand, O., C. Genthon, M. Fily, G. Krinner, G. Picard, M. Frezzotti, and A. A. Ekaykin (2007), An up-to-date qualitycontrolled surface mass balance data set for the

Multi-year record of atmospheric mercury at Dumont d'Urville, East Antarctic coast: continental outflow and oceanic influences

“…10, Hg tot concentrations increased between 600-800 and 1000-1100 km from DC in areas characterized by steeper slopes and higher snow accumulation values. Several studies reported a gradual increase in snow accumulation from DC toward the coast (Magand et al, 2007;Verfaillie et al, 2012;Favier et al, 2013), in good agreement with a gradual increase in humidity (Bromwich et al, 2004). These results suggest that the wet deposition of Hg(II) species was enhanced near the coast, resulting in elevated Hg tot concentrations in surface snow samples.…”

Snow accumulation variability derived from radar and firn core data along a 600 km transect in Adelie Land, East Antarctic plateau

“…As a result, unlike Arthern et al (2006), their method does not introduce local biases due to old measurements made in our study region. This points to the biases introduced by doubtful measurements in SMB extra-and interpolations, and confirms the need for data quality control, such as proposed by Magand et al (2007).…”

Snow melting bias in microwave mapping of Antarctic snow accumulation

“…Quality-controlled and updated SMB observations (referred as M07) (Magand et al, 2007) confirm the good accuracy of A06's map in ever-dry-snow region as on the Antarctic Plateau (Sect. 3.1) but also show the negative impact of surface melting (Sect.…”

“…Recently, (Magand et al, 2007) produced a qualitycontrolled dataset of SMB measurements by discarding SMB measurements which do not fit quality criteria based on 1) an up-to-date review and quality rating of various SMB measurement methods and 2) coherency, completion, or lack of meta-information (location, date of measurement, time period covered by the SMB values, primary data sources) related to each SMB record. The filtering procedure was applied on V99's dataset (the same data are also in A06) in (Fig.…”