Exploring snowfall climatology at ice rises along the Pacific coastline of West Antarctica using ERA5 reanalysis data
Climate change is the most important issue of the 21st century. West Antarctic ice rises, miniature ice sheets on the Antarctic coast, are important to monitor as the Earth continues to warm because they can give insight into regional climate processes affecting how ice melts and thus how much sea level will rise. Currently, data for these ice rises comes only from climate reanalysis. Snowfall is just one of the variables that can be analyzed through climate reanalysis data. The primary hypothesis for this project was: does snowfall seasonality change moving from west to east along the West Antarctic coastline? Matlab was used to attempt to explore climate reanalysis data and answer this question. Data was downloaded from the Climate Data Store in NetCDF form and graphs were created for snowfall, surface pressure, and wind climatologies. Once the graphs were created, snow seasonality could be determined at different locations. We find that there is a difference in austral Spring (September-October) snowfall between locations, most likely due to differences in dominant atmospheric circulation patterns and seasonal movement of the Amundsen Sea Low (pressure center). The next step in the process would be to determine if the climate reanalysis is accurate, which requires actual data from West Antarctic ice rises.