Meteorological Conditions During Snowfall at Terra Nova Bay (Antarctica)
Fig. 1. Map of North Victoria Land and sites where automatic weather stations (AWS) are
located. Squares mark US Programme AWSs; circles identify Italian ones
tion at TNB and McMurdo) do not support estimâtes of précipitation. It is possible to use other meteorological approaches to evaluate the précipitation rate. One
technique is the atmospheric moisture balance where the précipitation is found
as the residual from the budgeting of the fluxes of water vapour into and out of
an atmospheric volume [10]. Another approach is to sum précipitation amounts
calculated from estimâtes of synoptic-scale vertical motion [11]. Another different approach to inferring précipitation amounts and their variations over the
polar ice sheets is to measure the amount of snow accumulated over several years,
so meteorological and glaciological analyses hâve to be integrated [12].
The following analysis does not estimate précipitation amount, but is only
intended to detect précipitation épisodes. The main meteorological parameters