Identification

Title

Disentangling regional drivers of top Antarctic snowfall days with a convolutional neural network

Abstract

Snowfall is the primary contributor to Antarctic surface mass balance. Identifying regional‐scale mechanisms that drive heavy snowfall provides context for changes in Antarctic surface mass balance in a warmer climate. We compare drivers of top snowfall days across five Antarctic regions using machine learning and traditional synoptic diagnostics. A convolutional neural network identifies top snow days with an accuracy of 92%–94% per region when trained on just atmospheric moisture and low‐level meridional wind, highlighting the importance of atmospheric river‐like structures to top Antarctic snowfall days. The network's skill depends mainly on low‐level wind in East Antarctica and atmospheric moisture in West Antarctica, suggesting that dynamic processes are comparatively more important in driving East Antarctic top snowfall days. We leverage the quasi‐geostrophic omega equation to identify mechanisms for ascent and snowfall production, and we find that East Antarctic top snowfall days feature stronger synoptic‐scale forcing for ascent compared to West Antarctica.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7125z2h

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2025-05-28T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</span>

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact