Articles | Volume 16, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-75-2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-75-2023
Development and technical paper
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04 Jan 2023
Development and technical paper | Highlight paper |  | 04 Jan 2023

Improving snow albedo modeling in the E3SM land model (version 2.0) and assessing its impacts on snow and surface fluxes over the Tibetan Plateau

Dalei Hao, Gautam Bisht, Karl Rittger, Edward Bair, Cenlin He, Huilin Huang, Cheng Dang, Timbo Stillinger, Yu Gu, Hailong Wang, Yun Qian, and L. Ruby Leung

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Cited articles

Andreae, M. O. and Gelencsér, A.: Black carbon or brown carbon? The nature of light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosols, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 6, 3131–3148, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-6-3131-2006, 2006. 
Bair, E. H., Rittger, K., Skiles, S. M., and Dozier, J.: An Examination of Snow Albedo Estimates From MODIS and Their Impact on Snow Water Equivalent Reconstruction, Water Resour. Res., 55, 7826–7842, 2019. 
Bair, E., Stillinger, T., Rittger, K., and Skiles, M.: COVID-19 lockdowns show reduced pollution on snow and ice in the Indus River Basin, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 118, e2101174118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101174118, 2021a. 
Bair, E. H., Stillinger, T., and Dozier, J.: Snow Property Inversion From Remote Sensing (SPIReS): A Generalized Multispectral Unmixing Approach With Examples From MODIS and Landsat 8 OLI, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 59, 7270–7284, 2021b. 
Bair, E. H., Dozier, J., Stern, C., LeWinter, A., Rittger, K., Savagian, A., Stillinger, T., and Davis, R. E.: Divergence of apparent and intrinsic snow albedo over a season at a sub-alpine site with implications for remote sensing, The Cryosphere, 16, 1765–1778, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-1765-2022, 2022. 
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Executive editor
Surface albedo is critical to understanding the Earth's energy balance. It emerges that snow grain shape and internal mixing of impurities are both important to getting this right, but until now these have not been incorporated into Earth System Models. This paper appears to be the first time that these effects have been included in an Earth System Model.
Short summary
Snow with the highest albedo of land surface plays a vital role in Earth’s surface energy budget and water cycle. This study accounts for the impacts of snow grain shape and mixing state of light-absorbing particles with snow on snow albedo in the E3SM land model. The findings advance our understanding of the role of snow grain shape and mixing state of LAP–snow in land surface processes and offer guidance for improving snow simulations and radiative forcing estimates in Earth system models.
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