Regional snow cover in North East Greenland
Regional snow cover in North East Greenland
Snow cover in North East Greenland
The aim of the fieldwork is to validate snow modeling work (SnowModel, Liston and Elder 2006a,b) by collecting snow depth and snow density in a region from the east coast of Wollaston Foreland to the ice margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet. This will cover a coast–inland gradient in snow depth and snow cover duration. The location of snow depth and density observations will span the variations in landscape features, elevation gradients and aspect in order to answer the question:
What are the main drivers for the regional snow distribution?
The resulting snow model outputs will be made available for a range of ecosystem projects, e.g. a study of musk oxen movement in relation to spatial distribution of snow depth in the region, to learn more about their prioritizing and energy economizing in relation to moving around in a snow-covered landscape. This study is made in collaboration with Niels Martin Schmidt, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, who GPS-collared 14 musk oxen in autumn 2013 to follow their migration routes in Zackenberg and surroundings in 2013-2015. Finally, the snow observations made in Zackenberg and surroundings in April 2014 will be used in the implementation of SnowModel in the ice-free parts of Greenland, which is a central part of Stine Højlund Pedersen’s PhD project.
Field Site: Zackenberg and Daneborg, N.E. Greenland