Northern Research Basins Water Balance (Proceedings of a workshop held at Victoria, Canada, March 2004). IAHS Publ. 290, 2004, 257–268

Abstract Surface climate and resulting snow accumulation and melt distribution is examined for a catchment in northeast Greenland. From satellite observations, areas of bare ice in winter (no snow accumulation) indicate locally high wind speeds, which coincide with areas displaying high melt rates in summer. A network of climate stations was installed during the summer of 1995. The data serve as input to drive a simple spatially-distributed energy balance model. Using a simple model to drive the katabatic wind field on the glacier, a map of the snow distribution is proposed, which compares well with observations from a satellite image. It is difficult to determine whether the extent of the presented spatial variability in climate and mass balance is valid for other parts of the northeast Greenland ice sheet margin. However, this approach may improve modelling of the climate and melting distribution, because it attempts to move beyond a simple, elevation-dependent model toward a fully distributed formulation, which is necessary for describing the mass balance of a low ablation area with significant variability.

Key words energy balance; Greenland; katabatic winds; melt rates; North-Atlantic; snow drift; spatial modelling; surface observations