Influence of wet conditions on snow temperature diurnal variations: An East Antarctic sea-ice case study

A one-dimensional snow-sea-ice model is used to simulate the evolution of temperature profiles in dry and wet snow over a diurnal cycle, at locations where associated observations collected during the Sea Ice Physics and Ecosystem eXperiment (SIPEX-II) are available. The model is used at two sites, corresponding to two of the field campaign's sea-ice stations (2 and 6), and under two configurations: dry and wet snow conditions. In the wet snow model setups, liquid water may refreeze internally into the snow. At station 6, this releases latent heat to the snow and results in temperature changes at the base of the snow pack of a magnitude comparing to the model-observation difference (1-2 degrees C). As the temperature gradient across the snow is in turn weakened, the associated conductive heat flux through snow decreases. At station 2, internal refreezing also occurs but colder air temperatures and the competing process of strengthened heat conduction in snow concurrent to snow densification maintain a steady temperature profile. However, both situations share a common feature and show that the conductive heat flux through the snow may significantly be affected (by 10-20% in our simulations) as a result of the liquid water refreezing in snow, either through thermal conductivity enhancement or direct temperature gradient alteration. This ultimately gives motivation for further investigating the impacts of these processes on the sea-ice mass balance in the framework of global scale model simulations. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.