NSFGEO-NERC: Collaborative Research: ICECAPS-MELT

Overview: A three-year extension is proposed to the Integrated Characterization of Energy, Clouds, Atmospheric state, and Precipitation at Summit (ICECAPS) project. This project is an international collaboration that funds the original ICECAPS researchers through the U.S. National Science Foundation's Arctic Observing Network and a team of researchers at the University of Leeds through the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council. The ICECAPS project has continuously operated a sophisticated suite of ground-based instruments at Summit Station, Greenland since 2010 for observation of clouds, precipitation, and atmospheric structure. The project has significantly advanced the understanding of cloud properties, radiation and surface energy, and precipitation processes over the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) during a period of rapid climate change. The project has supported numerous national and international collaborations in process-based model evaluation, development of new measurement techniques, ground comparisons for multiple satellite measurements and aircraft missions, and operational radiosonde data for weather forecast models. We propose to complement the ICECAPS Summit observatory by building, testing and deploying an additional observatory for measuring parameters of the surface mass and energy budgets of the GrIS. The observatory takes a novel approach for unattended, autonomous operations by supporting a suite of instruments that require moderate power and manageable internet bandwidth. The new observatory will be deployed in successive summers at Summit Station in the dry-snow zone and at Dye-2 in the percolation zone. If this pilot project is successful, a network of these observatories will be proposed for future deployment that will observe the processes of air parcels as they move along Lagrangian trajectories in southwestern Greenland.