27 March 2025 | 10:30 - 12:00 (MDT)
Open Session - HYBRID
Room: UMC Fourth Floor - 415 / 417
Organisers: Mark Serreze (National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder, USA); Andrew Barrett (National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder, USA); Alex Crawford (University of Manitoba, Canada)
Session Description:
When rain falls on an existing cover of snow, followed by low temperatures, or falls as freezing rain, it can leave a hard crust. These Arctic rain-on-snow (ROS) events can profoundly influence the environment and in turn, human livelihoods. Impacts can be immediate (e.g. on human travel, herding, or harvesting) or evolve or accumulate, leading to massive starvation-induced die-offs of reindeer, caribou, and musk oxen, for example. Much remains to be learned about the meteorological conditions leading to ROS events and subsequent freezing, including links with the atmospheric circulation at the scale of planetary waves to the mesoscale to the local scale, their frequent association with atmospheric rivers, the distribution of events across the Arctic landscape and ocean, and whether events are becoming more common or severe in the warming climate. In turn, obtaining knowledge and information most germane to impacts, such as the thickness of ice layers, how ice layers form within a snowpack, and antecedent conditions that can amplify impacts, necessitates collaboration and knowledge co-production with community members and Indigenous knowledge-holders. This session invites contributions on all aspects of rain-on-snow events, and especially those that bridge different types of observations and ways of knowing to understand environmental and livelihood impacts.