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    Diurnal variation of midlatitudinal NO3 column abundance over table mountain facility, California
    (Göttingen : Copernicus GmbH, 2011) Chen, C.M.; Cageao, R.P.; Lawrence, L.; Stutz, J.; Salawitch, R.J.; Jourdain, L.; Li, Q.; Sander, S.P.
    The column abundance of NO3 was measured over Table Mountain Facility, CA (34.4° 117.7° W) from May 2003 through September 2004, using lunar occultation near full moon with a grating spectrometer. The NO 3 column retrieval was performed with the differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) technique using both the 623 and 662 nm NO 3 absorption bands. Other spectral features such as Fraunhofer lines and absorption from water vapor and oxygen were removed using solar spectra obtained at different airmass factors. We observed a seasonal variation, with nocturnally averaged NO3 columns between 5-7 × 1013 molec cm-2 during October through March, and 5-22 × 10 13 molec cm-2 during April through September. A subset of the data, with diurnal variability vastly different from the temporal profile obtained from one-dimensional stratospheric model calculations, clearly has boundary layer contributions; this was confirmed by simultaneous long-path DOAS measurements. However, even the NO3 columns that did follow the modeled time evolution were often much larger than modeled stratospheric partial columns constrained by realistic temperatures and ozone concentrations. This discrepancy is attributed to substantial tropospheric NO3 in the free troposphere, which may have the same time dependence as stratospheric NO 3.
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    Antarctic sub-shelf melt rates via PICO
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2018) Reese, Ronja; Albrecht, Torsten; Mengel, Matthias; Asay-Davis, Xylar; Winkelmann, Ricarda
    Ocean-induced melting below ice shelves is one of the dominant drivers for mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet at present. An appropriate representation of sub-shelf melt rates is therefore essential for model simulations of marine-based ice sheet evolution. Continental-scale ice sheet models often rely on simple melt-parameterizations, in particular for long-term simulations, when fully coupled ice–ocean interaction becomes computationally too expensive. Such parameterizations can account for the influence of the local depth of the ice-shelf draft or its slope on melting. However, they do not capture the effect of ocean circulation underneath the ice shelf. Here we present the Potsdam Ice-shelf Cavity mOdel (PICO), which simulates the vertical overturning circulation in ice-shelf cavities and thus enables the computation of sub-shelf melt rates consistent with this circulation. PICO is based on an ocean box model that coarsely resolves ice shelf cavities and uses a boundary layer melt formulation. We implement it as a module of the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM) and evaluate its performance under present-day conditions of the Southern Ocean. We identify a set of parameters that yield two-dimensional melt rate fields that qualitatively reproduce the typical pattern of comparably high melting near the grounding line and lower melting or refreezing towards the calving front. PICO captures the wide range of melt rates observed for Antarctic ice shelves, with an average of about 0.1 m a−1 for cold sub-shelf cavities, for example, underneath Ross or Ronne ice shelves, to 16 m a−1 for warm cavities such as in the Amundsen Sea region. This makes PICO a computationally feasible and more physical alternative to melt parameterizations purely based on ice draft geometry.