Collaborative Research: NSFGEO-NERC: Integrated Characterization of Energy, Clouds, Atmospheric state, and Precipitation at Summit: Measurements along Lagrangian Transects

This is a project that is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation’s Directorate of Geosciences (NSF/GEO) and the National Environment Research Council (UKRI/NERC) of the United Kingdom (UK) via the NSF/GEO-NERC Lead Agency Agreement. This Agreement allows a single joint US/UK proposal to be submitted and peer-reviewed by the Agency whose investigator has the largest proportion of the budget. Upon successful joint determination of an award, each Agency funds the proportion of the budget and the investigators associated with its own proposals and component of the work.

This research project continues an 11-year field experiment called the Integrated Characterization of Energy, Clouds, Atmospheric state, and Precipitation at Summit (ICECAPS) and adds measurements along Lagrangian transects (ICECAPS-MELT). The project is an international collaboration that has been operating ground-based instruments at Summit Station in Greenland since 2010, taking observations of the atmosphere to advance understanding of cloud properties, radiation and surface energy, and precipitation processes over the Greenland Ice Sheet. It is an important time to make these observations because Greenland is undergoing changes due to rapid shifts in Arctic climate. The current project continues the observations made at Summit Station and expands measurements along transects to another important region of Greenland called the percolation zone. In this zone, melt water is generated at the surface, where it can percolate down into the snow and then refreeze. This creates ice layers that can cause additional melt water to move horizontally rather than vertically. It is important to understand these processes because melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a significant contributor to global sea level, which is predicted to impact humans significantly over the next century.

This new ICECAPS-MELT project complements the ICECAPS Summit observatory by building a new mobile observatory for measuring parameters of the surface mass and energy budgets of the Greenland Ice Sheet. This observatory uses a novel approach for unattended, autonomous operation by supporting instruments that require moderate power and internet bandwidth yet are quite like those operated at Summit Station. The new observatory measures surface mass and energy budget parameters, including precipitation, cloud properties, radiative and turbulent fluxes, near-surface meteorology, and subsurface temperatures and structure. To do this, the ICECAPS-MELT team deploys a precipitation radar, a cloud lidar, a microwave radiometer, a ground-penetrating radar, and an automated surface flux station, which consume approximately 500 W of power under normal conditions. The project will lead to new insights into how parameters of the surface mass and energy budgets co-vary in space and time between this new observatory and the ongoing measurements at Summit. Trajectory analyses track the changes in air parcels as they ascend the Greenland Ice Sheet and pass over the two observational sites. The mobile observatory will be deployed in successive summers at Summit Station in the dry-snow zone and at the DYE-2 station in the percolation zone. If this project is successful, a network of these observatories will be proposed for future deployment in southwestern Greenland, which will provide new insights into how atmospheric properties and processes are coupled both spatially and temporally to the ice sheet’s surface and subsurface conditions over Greenland.