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Influence of the orographic roughness of glacier valleys across the Transantarctic Mountains in an atmospheric regional model

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Abstract

Glacier valleys across the Transantarctic Mountains are not properly taken into account in climate models, because of their coarse resolution. Nonetheless, glacier valleys control katabatic winds in this region, and the latter are thought to affect the climate of the Ross Sea sector, frsater formation to snow mass balance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of the production of turbulent kinetic energy by the subgrid-scale orography in the Transantarctic Mountains using a 20-km atmospheric regional model. A classical orographic roughness length parametrization is modified to produce either smooth or rough valleys. A one-year simulation shows that katabatic winds in the Transantarctic Mountains are strongly improved using smooth valleys rather than rough valleys. Pressure and temperature fields are affected by the representation of the orographic roughness, specifically in the Transantarctic Mountains and over the Ross Ice Shelf. A smooth representation of escarpment regions shows better agreement with automatic weather station observations than a rough representation. This work stresses the need to improve the representation of subgrid-scale orography to simulate realistic katabatic flows. This paper also provides a way of improving surface winds in an atmospheric model without increasing its resolution.

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Acknowledgment

The manuscript benefited from helpful comments of several anonymous reviewers. We thank Christophe Eugéne Menkes for support in the revision process.

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  1. Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnement, Saint Martin d’Héres, France

    Nicolas C. Jourdain & Hubert Gallée

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  1. Nicolas C. Jourdain
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Correspondence to Nicolas C. Jourdain.

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Jourdain, N.C., Gallée, H. Influence of the orographic roughness of glacier valleys across the Transantarctic Mountains in an atmospheric regional model. Clim Dyn 36, 1067–1081 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-010-0757-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-010-0757-7

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