Characterizing the influence of idealized atmospheric forcings on firn using the SNOWPACK firn model

The porous layer of snow and firn that blankets ice sheets can store meltwater and buffer an ice sheet’s contribution to sea level rise. A warming climate threatens this buffering capacity and will likely lead to depletion of the air-filled pore space, known as the firn air content. The timing and nature of the firn’s response to climate change is uncertain. Thus, understanding how the firn may evolve in different climate scenarios remains important. Here we use a one-dimensional, physics-based firn model (SNOWPACK) to simulate firn properties over time. To force the model, we generate idealized, synthetic atmospheric datasets that represent distinct climatologies on the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets. The forcing datasets include temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed and direction, shortwave radiation, and longwave radiation, which SNOWPACK uses as input to simulate a firn column through time. We perturb the input variables to determine how firn properties respond to the perturbation, and how long it takes for those properties to reach a new equilibrium. We explore how different combinations of perturbations impact the firn to assess the effects of, for example, a warmer and wetter climate versus a warmer and drier climate. The firn properties of greatest interest are the firn air content, liquid water content, firn temperature, density, and ice slab content since these quantities help define the meltwater storage capacity of the firn layer. In our preliminary analysis, we find that with a relatively warm and wet base climatology representative of a location in southern Greenland, increasing the air temperature by 1 K yields a 48% decrease in firn air content and a 3% increase in the deep firn temperature 100 years after the perturbation. SNOWPACK also simulates near-surface, low-permeability ice slabs that inhibit potential meltwater storage in deeper firn. Conversely, decreasing the air temperature by 1 K yields a 7% increase in firn air content and a <1% decrease in the deep firn temperature in the same amount of time. In this scenario, the effects of warming are more extreme and have more adverse impacts on the firn’s meltwater storage capacity when compared to cooling. This work highlights the sensitivity of the firn to changing atmospheric variables and provides a framework for estimating the timescales and magnitude of firn responses to a changing climate.