hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
The wide range of wind regimes in Antarctica interacts with the snow surface topography and shapes various snow bedforms, such as linear dunes or barchans. They are representative of the local scale processes of accumulation and erosion, and thus adapt to the change in snow structure, metamorphism, snow precipitation, and redistribution. Understanding these interactions is important to better constrain the surface mass balance, interpretation of ice core, and modelling of the near-surface wind field in Antarctica. While the wide variety of snow bedforms encountered at the Antarctic surface have been qualitatively described, little is known about their spatial distribution.
In this study, we present a continent-wide study of linear dunes orientation in Antarctica in relation to wind regimes. We used Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 images with, respectively, a 10 m and 15 m resolution to retrieve dune orientation. Using wind direction and speed from ERA5 Reanalysis with a 0.25°x0.25° resolution, we show that longitudinal dune is the predominant type of dune in Antarctica and that they form by elongation in the mean snow flux direction.
