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Abstract

Although a decrease in the overall mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has been reported since the 1990s, only the west of East Antarctica has reported an increase in mass since the mid-2000s, with the timing of extreme precipitation events. In the west of East Antarctica, four Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) have been installed by the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition along the elevation gradient. In this study, we focus on blowing snow process that affects the surface mass balance of the ice sheet in the west of East Antarctica, where mass gain has been reported. Blowing snow plays a role in redistributing snow once accumulated, and it is not yet clear how extreme snowfalls will be redistributed. We calculated the correlation coefficients between the wind speeds by the AWS installed near the top of the ice sheet and the blowing snow frequency at the same area by ICESat-2 (ATL17, Version 4) using data from January 2022 to July 2022. The results showed that the correlation coefficients were -0.17 (between the wind speeds and the 25 Hz high-rate blowing snow frequency), -0.23 (between the wind speeds and the 1 Hz low-rate blowing snow frequency), and +0.97 (between the 25 Hz high-rate blowing snow frequency and the 1 Hz low-rate blowing snow frequency). Little relationship was found between the wind speeds and the blowing snow frequency during this period. We plan to further investigate the presence of snowfall and snow surface conditions in the west of East Antarctica.