More recently it has been found that scatterometer data are also very valuable for land, snow and ice applications. Parameters like surface moisture, sea ice concentrations, sea ice age and snow conditions could be successfully retrieved using scatterometer data. Particularly promising is the derivation of sea ice masks based on the polarization ratios of the scatterometer data (for NSCAT) and ...

It is well known that space-born microwave and infrared (IR) polarization measurements allow the development of advanced technologies for permanent snow and ice pack monitoring in the Arctic region. But the interpretation of these data are complicated because variations of atmospheric radiation start to be close to the brightness contrasts of different types of ice. On the other hand, the same ...

[1] The influence of anthropogenic aerosol (sulfate and soot) on upper tropospheric (UT) clouds through ice nucleation is studied using the NCAR Community Atmospheric Model Version 3 (CAM3) with a double moment ice microphysics treatment coupled to a global aerosol model (LLNL/UMich IMPACT). Present-day and preindustrial simulations are performed and compared for two scenarios. In the first sce...

The earth is warming at an alarming rate, especially in the Arctic, where a marked decline in sea ice cover may have far-ranging consequences for endemic species. Little auks, endemic Arctic seabirds, are key bioindicators as they forage in the marginal ice zone and feed preferentially on lipid-rich Arctic copepods and ice-associated amphipods sensitive to the consequences of global warming. We...

[1] In September–October 2005, the juxtaposition of lowand high-pressure anomalies at 130 W and 60 W, respectively, created strong and persistent northerly airflow across the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). This had a major impact on regional sea ice conditions, with extreme ice compaction in the Bellingshausen and East Amundsen seas (60 W 130 W) but divergence in the West Amundsen and East Ros...

0019-1035/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.11.034 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (L. Han), showman man). We present self-consistent, fully coupled two-dimensional (2D) numerical models of thermal evolution and tidal heating to investigate how convection interacts with tidal dissipation under the influence of non-Newtonian grain-size-sensit...

Ongoing and projected greenhouse warming clearly manifests itself in the Arctic regions, which warm faster than any other part of the world. One of the key features of amplified Arctic warming concerns Arctic winter warming (AWW), which exceeds summer warming by at least a factor of 4. Here we use observation-driven reanalyses and state-of-the-art climate models in a variety of standardised cli...

[1] The last glacial inception ( 116 ky ago) has long been used to test the sensitivity of climate models to insolation. From these simulations, atmospheric, oceanic and vegetation feedbacks have been shown to amplify the initial insolation signal into a rapid growth of ice-sheets over the northern hemisphere. However, due to the lack of comprehensive atmosphere-ocean-vegetation-northern hemisp...

The flow of energy from the impact site of a heavy, translationally energetic xenon atom on an ice surface leads to several non-equilibrium events. The central focus of this paper is on the collision-induced desorption (sputtering) of water molecules into the gas-phase from the ice surface. Sputtering is strongly activated with respect to xenon translational energy, and a threshold for desorpti...

[1] Plastic sea ice rheologies that employ teardrop and parabolic lens yield curves and allow varying biaxial tensile stresses have been developed. These rheologies, together with the previously developed ellipse and Mohr-Coulomb-ellipse rheologies, are implemented in a thickness and enthalpy distribution sea ice model to examine the rheological effect in numerical investigations of arctic clim...