Spatial and temporal changes in surface mass balance derived from airborne radio sounding for the plateau area in Dronning Maud Land

Contrary to the rest of the Antarctic ice sheet, East Antarctica currently gains mass due to an increase in snow accumulation over the last decades. How or if this increase is linked to anthropogenic warming is not yet clear and requires better understanding of the surface mass balance history over the last centuries, and also the dependency of snow accumulation with the local surface slopes across different spatial scales.

Here, we present a novel airborne dataset using the multichannel ultra-wideband radar system from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany with a decadal vertical resolution for the plateau area in Dronning Maud Land. We assess the spatial and temporal variability of surface mass balance and snow accumulation for the past centuries for an area of ~200,000 km². With this contribution, we aim to (1) show the potential to use ultra-wideband radar systems to reconstruct the recent surface mass balance and accumulation rates in low-accumulation regions, (2) present information on large spatial scales, and (3) discuss potential overlap of interests and/or data in this and/or other areas on the plateau of East Antarctica.