Abstract. Snow temperature, density, and layering were measured in four summers in the Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica. Data from a 310-km-long transect showed that the most homogeneous snow pack located in the Riiser-Larsen Ice Shelf, while horizontal gradients in snow density, temperature, and hardness were larger in the escarpment region. In the local scale, day-to-day temporal variability dominated the standard deviation of snow temperature, while the diurnal cycle was next important, and horizontal variability in the scale of 0.4 to 10 m was the smallest component. The day-to-day and total small-scale variability decreased exponentially with depth with an e-folding depth at 0.25 to 0.30 m. Snow temperature depended on the cloud cover in the uppermost 0.30 m and snow density in the uppermost 0.10 m. Both in the intra-pit and transect scales, the ratio of horizontal to temporal variability increased with depth. In the intra-pit scale the temporal variability in snow density exceeded the horizontal variability throughout the uppermost 0.50 m layer, but in the 100-km scale only in the uppermost centimetres. The horizontal standard deviation of snow density increased rapidly between the scales of 0.4 and 2 m, and much more gradually from 101 to 102 m.
Spatial and temporal variability in summer snow pack in the Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica