Call for Abstracts
American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2004 Fall Meeting
Session C 09: Roughness of Snow and Ice Surfaces
The AGU Submission Form is available online at:
http://submissions4.agu.org/submission/entrance.asp
Abstract Submission Deadline:
Thursday, 9 September 2004 at 2359 UT (Submissions via the web)
SESSION DESCRIPTION
Snow and ice surface roughness is an important variable in the study of
surface-atmosphere exchanges, including the investigation of melt
processes at several scales from a local snowpack to ablation of the
Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, wind transport and erosion, study of
sea ice and modeling of climatic and atmospheric processes and their
changes. Suncups, sastrugi, crevasses, and large dunes manifest
themselves in the surface morphology of glaciers and snow fields at the
millimeter to 10's-of-kilometer scale providing valuable but largely
unused indicators of geophysical and environmental processes. Surface
roughness is not only important in the reflectance and scattering of
remote-sensing signals, roughness information derived from satellite
data may also provide useful glaciologic and climatic information.
In the past few years, the concept of roughness of snow and ice surfaces
as a geophysical variable has received increased consideration. The
session invites contributions from scientists working in a wide range of
disciplines to obtain an integrated picture of the role of surface
roughness in snow and ice research, geophysics, atmospheric research,
remote sensing and related sciences, including, but not limited, to the
following topics: Methods for the determination of surface roughness
from field observations, role of roughness length in atmospheric and
climatic modeling, assessment of changes in roughness for ice-sheet mass
balance, roughness as indicator of sea ice distribution and
characteristics, role of roughness in melt-processes at the plot scale,
snow-hydrologic processes, analysis of spatial surface roughness,
derivation of roughness from satellite data, influence of roughness on
satellite signals, and utilization of roughness as an indicator variable
in glaciology.
Convener:
Ute Christina Herzfeld
CIRES/NSIDC, University of Colorado
E-mail: herzfeld [at] iceberg.colorado.edu
Helmut Mayer
Institut fur Mechanik, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt
E-mail: mayerh [at] mechanik.tu-darmstadt.de
The AGU Submission Form is available online at:
http://submissions4.agu.org/submission/entrance.asp