Crocus, a one-dimensional model of snow-cover stratigraphy and evolution,
was developed by the Cenire d’Etudes de la Neige (CEN, Météo-France) and
extensively validated in temperate Alpine conditions. We present here a
study of Crocus’s ability to reproduce the characteristics of polar snow at
the surface of ice sheets. Crocus simulates the evolution of the thermal and
structural features of snow cover as a function of meteorological parameters
at the snow-atmosphere interface. Only models can provide the necessary
meteorologic at information with full ice-sheet spatial coverage, and with
the temporal resolution needed by Crocus. Meteorological data have been
extracted from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
(ECMWF) archives (analyses and short-term predictions), over the entire
surface of Antarctica with a spatial resolution of 1.5°. Here, the ECMWF
data from the South Pole are first compared with observations to check their
quality. Then, 20 year simulations of snow covet are computed to test the
sensitivity of Crocus to inaccuracies in the meteorological input. The
simulated snow characteristics exhibit a strong sensitivity to air
temperature, accumulation rate and the initial density of depositing snow.
However, even with no major model adaptation to polar conditions, Crocus
does reproduce a number of thermal and structural features of polar
snow.