Snow – those marvelous little crystals of frozen water that drift down from the sky – in gentle silence, in the fury of an artic-like blizzard, or in any and everything in between. .. Where I grew up, snow was something that we traveled a couple of hours to visit for the day. Once a decade, we’d rent a cabin up in snow- country and spend a week with aunts and uncles and cousins. But I never had to live where it snowed in the winter – I surfed in the winter.
Weather Rocks the Climate, With near-term influences such as the La Nina stubbornly remaining on the cooling side as well as increasing volcanic activity, Greenland, Antarctic, Global Cooling, Ice Age
The application of diffusion theory and Monte Carlo lidar radiative transfer simulations presented in Part I of this series of study suggests that snow depth can be derived from the first-, second- and third-order moments of the lidar backscattering pathlength distribution. These methods are now applied to the satellite ICESat-2 lidar measurements over the Arctic sea ice and land surfaces of Northern Hemisphere. Over the Arctic sea ice, the ICESat-2 retrieved snow depths agree well with co-located IceBridge snow radar measured values with a root-mean-square (RMS) difference of 7.8 cm or 29.2% of the mean snow depth. The terrestrial snow depths derived from ICESat-2 show drastic spatial variation of the snowpack along ICESat-2 ground tracks over the Northern Hemisphere, which are consistent with the University of Arizona (UA) and Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) gridded daily snow products. The RMS difference in snow depths between ICESat-2 and UA gridded daily snow products is 14 c