📝NEW paper out today🥳
❄️We look at extreme snow and rain (yes, rain!) in West Antarctica over the Thwaites and Pine Island ice shelves.
In it, we show that atmospheric rivers - long, thin "rivers in the sky" that bring tons of heat & moisture - deliver huge amounts of snow... and even rain 🌧️
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❄️We look at extreme snow and rain (yes, rain!) in West Antarctica over the Thwaites and Pine Island ice shelves.
In it, we show that atmospheric rivers - long, thin "rivers in the sky" that bring tons of heat & moisture - deliver huge amounts of snow... and even rain 🌧️
1/8
Comments
It's based on the lines of longitude (obviously at the exact south pole everything is north but anywhere else can be more or less east/west). 0-180 degrees of longitude is east, 180-360 (or -180 to 0) degrees is west.
Seems to become more common and severe these days, this essay was from 2020. We're not going to make it that much longer, are we? 🥺
Observations are scarce in this region and we have obs of snowfall only over Thwaites (thanks to AMIGOS sensors). All models do well, and better than ERA5 ⬇️
This makes hi-res modelling essential!
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☔Rain is also falling at sub-zero temperatures over the ice shelves and even over the ice streams of Thwaites and Pine Island.
Rain (dark blue contours) falls above the melt line (dashed) in this figure, showing a transect through PIG.
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Hi-res really helps here, and it's all we've got to go on because there are no observations of rainfall in this region - this really should change!
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The slopes also drive warming near the surface, and ramp up the production of snow via a phenomenon called the seeder-feeder effect.
Fig from https://wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-seeder-feeder-effect.html
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Watch here: ▶️ https://youtu.be/0-zLGu2t_e0
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https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-atmospheric-rivers-are-bringing-rain-to-west-antarctica
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Tip, if you’re going to include a link to a paper include it in the first post as that’s the one which will be reposted way more times than any other post in the thread. Reposts also contribute to measurable reach such as #altmetrics.