Snow depth on Arctic sea ice from historical in situ data

Shalina, Elena V.; Sandven, Stein

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-1867-2018

Articles | Volume 12, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-1867-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-1867-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 6

Research article

| Highlight paper

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05 Jun 2018

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 05 Jun 2018

Snow depth on Arctic sea ice from historical in situ data

Elena V. Shalina and Stein Sandven

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Final revised paper (published on 05 Jun 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 22 Dec 2017)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of 'Snow depth on Arctic sea ice from historical in situ data'', S. Hendricks, 19 Jan 2018
- AC1: 'Reply to S. Hendricks (Referee)', Elena Shalina, 24 Mar 2018
RC2: 'Review of Shaline and Sandven', Anonymous Referee #2, 31 Jan 2018
- AC2: 'Reply to Anonymous Referee #2', Elena Shalina, 24 Mar 2018
RC3: 'Review of "Snow depth on Arctic sea ice from historical in situ data."', Anonymous Referee #3, 01 Feb 2018
- AC3: 'Reply to the Anonymous Referee #3', Elena Shalina, 24 Mar 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Elena Shalina on behalf of the Authors (08 Apr 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (19 Apr 2018) by Julienne Stroeve

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (01 May 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (07 May 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I thank the authors for their time in revising the manuscript and addressing my concerns raised in the first review. The manuscript has greatly improved in clarity and the additional content has strengthened the analysis. Please find minor suggestions below that I hope the authors will find constructive.

Page 2, Line 4. Please provide a reference for the albedo value for snow. Contemporary studies have shown 0.85 for cold, dry snow.

Page 15, Lines 3-4. It might be insightful to compare these values to those in Filhol and Sturm (2015).

Page 16, Lines 23-24. This explanation is not correct. The snow depth distributions in Figure 9 show that the Central Arctic has the largest variability relative to other regions (e.g., it has the widest spread and longest tail among the distributions). It only takes one wind event to redistribute the snow to the ice surface topography. Thus the magnitude of wind speed in different regions is not a convincing explanation for differences in snow drifts surrounding hummocks and ridges. If the authors choose to keep this statement in, I encourage them to change the wording to reflect that this is speculation:
"...which may have given a smoother snow depth distribution for the central Arctic."

Page 19, Figure 9. There is a typo for "Chukchi Sea" in the bottom right panel.

Page 24, Line 13. I suggest including a statement that notes the unrealistic jump in snow depth in IMB buoy 2013F. It is not possible for a ~25 cm snowfall event to occur within a four-hour time period.

Page 27, Lines 28-29. Were all IMB buoys included in this comparison for the Central Arctic? Some of the buoys were located in the marginal seas in Figure 12, which would be worth noting.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (09 May 2018) by Julienne Stroeve

AR by Elena Shalina on behalf of the Authors (17 May 2018) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

In this paper we analyze snow data from Soviet airborne expeditions, Sever, which operated in late winter 1959-1986, in the Arctic and made snow measurements on the ice around plane landing sites. The snow measurements were made on the multiyear ice in the central Arctic and on the first-year ice in the Eurasian seas in the areas for which snow characteristics are poorly described in the literature. The main goal of this study is to produce an improved data set of snow depth on the sea ice.