Autonomous ice sheet surface mass balance measurements from cosmic rays

Howat, Ian M.; de la Peña, Santiago; Desilets, Darin; Womack, Gary

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-2099-2018

Articles | Volume 12, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-2099-2018

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-2099-2018

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

Articles | Volume 12, issue 6

Research article

|

19 Jun 2018

Research article |

| 19 Jun 2018

Autonomous ice sheet surface mass balance measurements from cosmic rays

Ian M. Howat, Santiago de la Peña, Darin Desilets, and Gary Womack

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Final revised paper (published on 19 Jun 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 16 Feb 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Referee comment on Howat et al', Anonymous Referee #1, 14 Mar 2018
- AC1: 'Reponse to Reviewer 1', Ian M. Howat, 17 May 2018
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 19 Mar 2018
- AC2: 'Response to reviewer 2', Ian M. Howat, 17 May 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Ian M. Howat on behalf of the Authors (17 May 2018) Author's response

ED: Publish as is (07 Jun 2018) by Valentina Radic

AR by Ian M. Howat on behalf of the Authors (07 Jun 2018)

Short summary

In this paper we present the first application of cosmic ray neutron sensing for continuously measuring in situ accumulation on an ice sheet. We validate these results with manual snow coring and snow stake measurements, showing that the cosmic ray observations are of similar if not better accuracy. We also present our observations of variability in accumulation over 24 months at Summit Camp, Greenland. We conclude that cosmic ray sensing has a high potential for measuring surface mass balance.