Dry snow initialization and densification over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in the ORCHIDEE land surface model

Conesa, Philippe; Agosta, Cécile; Charbit, Sylvie; Dumas, Christophe; Beylat, Simon; Raoult, Nina

doi:10.5194/tc-20-4973-2026

Articles | Volume 20, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-4973-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-4973-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 9

Research article

|

03 Sep 2026

Research article |

| 03 Sep 2026

Dry snow initialization and densification over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in the ORCHIDEE land surface model

Philippe Conesa, Cécile Agosta, Sylvie Charbit, Christophe Dumas, Simon Beylat, and Nina Raoult

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-4973-2026-supplement

Data sets

Dry snow initialization and densification over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in the ORCHIDEE land surface model: Datasets and Model Outputs Philippe Conesa https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20343275

simonbeylat/History_Matching_ORCHIDEE: v1.0.1 (Dry_snow_init) S. Beylat and NRaoult https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17523380

The SUMup collaborative database: Surface mass balance, subsurface temperature and density measurements from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (2025 release) B. Vandecrux et al. https://doi.org/10.18739/A2M61BR5M

Model code and software

ORCHIDEE-ICE_init_density IPSL https://doi.org/10.14768/ec44f2dc-f822-4838-82ec-7678232eba46

Dry snow initialization and densification over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in the ORCHIDEE land surface model: Scripts Philippe Conesa https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20343298

Init-snowpack module: Snowpack Initialization over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets C. Agosta and P. Conesa https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21885232

Short summary

As Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are almost entirely covered by snow, a proper modelling of the internal snowpack processes is essential to predict their evolution. This study evaluates the snow densification over ice sheets in the ORCHIDEE (Organising Carbon and Hydrology In Dynamic Ecosystems) land surface model. The development of a new formulation for the surface snow density and the calibration of densification parameters improve the model agreement with polar snow observations.