About UV albedo of seasonal snow at Sodankyla including Arctic - Antarctic comparison aspects

Finland is especially advantageous for snow albedo studies, as it represents the European Arctic, the snow cover melts every year, we have five out of the six global snow classes, and the topography is flat, thus favorable to albedo studies. In 2007, new continuous broadband measurements on Arctic snow UV albedo at Sodankyla (67°22'N, 26°39'E, 179 m asl) were started by the Finnish Meteorological Institute as part of the IPY activities. Weekly snow samples have been collected for BC analyses at Sodankyla since 2009, and snow grain size data belongs to the snow time regular measurement procedures at Sodankyla as well. In literature, albedo values for clean snow in UV-VIS are 0.97-0.98, consistent with the extremely small absorption coefficient of ice in this spectral range. We have found that in case of intensively melting Arctic snow, with melt water surrounding the several millimeter snow grains, containing possibly BC up to 40 ppb and organic carbon up to 1734 ppb, and confirmed by three independent ancillary snow albedo measurements, the UV-VIS albedo of snow measured at an open snow covered field (surrounded by distant trees not shadowing the field during the measurement) can be around 0.5-0.7. For comparison, we have measured the clean Arctic Sea ice and snow at 87°N to have A = 0.91 - 0.92 both in the UV and VIS. Our experimental results on artificially sooted snow show that when albedo of natural southern Finnish snow was A_VIS=0.92 and A_UV=0.70, with surface EC=87 ppb, then introducing an amount of EC=4916 ppb soot on the surface of snow, decreased albedo immediately into A=0.28-0.29 in both the UV and VIS. We have also studied the SZA asymmetry of albedo found in the Arctic and Antarctic albedo data, and Radiative Transfer (RT) model calculations have been used to study e.g. the effect of the measured local albedo on radiative forcing.