Measurements at Finse Alpine Research Centre during winter 2018/2019

Continuous vapour and precipitation sampling with 7 Intense Observation Periods to monitor the build-up of the winter snow pack, from 7 December 2018 to 5 February 2019.

Vapour inlet
Heated vapour isotope inlet at Finse Alpine Research Centre in 2019

A key objective of the SNOWPACE project was to understand the build-up of the seasonal snowpack in the mountains of southern Norway. Finse Alpine Research Centre is a high mountain observatory providing the infrastructure to observe how different weather events contribute to the snowpack. Since the water isotope composition is a combined signal of the moisture source, transport, and condensation processes, the snowpack should contain these signals, weighted by the corresponding precipitation amount. Deposition and post-deposition conditions are important modulators of the precipitation input. During winter 2018/2019, a combination of continuous vapour isotope measurements, daily and event-based precipitation sampling, and snow pits allowed an assessment of the atmospheric input, and its archiving and conservation in the snow pack (Lanzky et al., in prep.).

The combined vapour and precipitation dataset, with corresponding meteorological observations, will be archived at the pangea database, and made available with publication of the corresponding publication.

References
Lanzky et al., in prep.