Antarctic Cloud Properties and Their Effect on the Surface Energy Budget

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This proposed work is a study of how satellite data can be used to improve our understanding of how antarctic cloud characteristics affect the exchange of radiation and the surface energy budget of the antarctic ice sheet. Current general circulation models (GCMs) of the atmosphere are notoriously poor at incorporating the effects of clouds in polar latitudes, and cannot reproduce valid surface temperatures and winds. The reason for this lies in the fact that the ice surface and cloud tops look very much the same in the visible spectrum, and the surface temperatures and cloud top temperatures are not sufficiently different to produce identifiable differences in the infra-red spectrum. Without careful consideration of these confounding effects, models that represent antarctic climate processes affecting the mass balance of the antarctic ice sheet have a very limited verisimilitude.This study will be concerned with three tasks: (1) construct a climatology of cloud amount, height, temperature, phase (ice vs. water), optical depth, and effective particle radius; (2) conduct sensitivity studies of cloud, atmospheric, and surface properties on the surface energy budget, and (3) generate an improved surface energy budget by combining satellite data, GCM analyses, and a regional climate model.Even though the uncertainties in some components may be large, the energy budget resulting from this high degree of data assimilation and integration is expected to be more accurate than anything else currently available on the large scale.