Abstract: Paris school of mines engineer thesis report
Abstract: Precipitation in the interior of the Antarctic continent plays a crucial role in the mass balance of the ice-sheet. Nevertheless, few observations have been made to quantify the snowfall and it is not clear how accurately the phenomenon is reproduced by climate models. For these reasons, a disdrometer (VPF-730, Biral) was set up on the Antarctic Plateau in 2009 at the French-Italian station Concordia. The observations were compared to a limited area model and a meteorological reanalysis. To account for the important dierences between observations and models, a cluster analysis was performed on the disdrometer data. This method allowed to separate artefacts from actual snow events and to distinguish snow events among themselves. If the artefacts are excluded from the dataset, the agreement with the models is improved, at least in terms of the timing of events. A recalibration for specic snow types could potentially yield information on the magnitude of the events as well.
Can be downloaded at http://www-lgge.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr/~christo/calva/reports/Rapport_AmbroiseDufour.pdf