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Drone Imagery Reveals Marked Variability in Antarctic Snow Roughness
Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface
Antarctica’s snow and ice surfaces play a key role in how the continent exchanges heat and moisture with the atmosphere. A key property controlling this exchange is aerodynamic roughness length (zo), which measures how “bumpy” the surface is. Rougher surfaces, such as snow sastrugi (wind-formed ridges and grooves), interact more strongly with the air above, affecting snow movement, melting, and local environmental conditions. Despite its importance, zo is often treated as a single, constant value over large areas in Earth system models because it is difficult to measure.
Zheng et al. [2026] use a multi-temporal Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) oblique photogrammetry to map fine scale zo variability at Qinling Station in East Antarctica. The results show that zo can vary substantially depending on surface type, measurement scale, model choice, and meteorological conditions. The complex response of surface microtopography to meteorological events is a noteworthy new finding. For example, in snow sastrugi areas, zo can vary by an order of magnitude over time, increasing after snowfall and decreasing under strong winds. These findings highlight that capturing fine-scale surface roughness is essential for accurately modeling snow–atmosphere interactions in Antarctica and could help improve current weather and climate models for polar regions.
Citation: Zheng, Z., Zheng, L., Wang, K., Clow, G. D., & Cheng, X. (2026). UAV oblique imagery reveals order-of-magnitude changes in snow aerodynamic roughness length under shifting meteorological regimes at Qinling Station, East Antarctica. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 131, e2025JF008781. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JF008781
—Elizabeth Orr, Associate Editor, JGR: Earth Surface
