Physics-based narrowband optical parameters for snow albedo simulation in climate models

The error, however, becomes larger as snowpack thickens (with biases of up to 0.05 for semi-infinite snowpack), because the snow radiative transfer is highly nonlinear and is most significant at wavelengths <1 mu m. In this study, we propose a novel method to retrieve broadband optical parameters according to snow radiative transfer theory, reducing the albedo biases to <0.003 for 2 cm snowpacks and <0.005 for thick snowpacks.

We find little impact in changing incident spectra on narrowband snow albedo. These newly derived narrowband optical parameters improve snow albedo accuracy by a factor of 10, allowing to trace the impacts of aerosol pollution in snow. The parameters are independent of which two-stream approximation is used, and are thus applicable to sea ice, glaciers, and seasonal snow cover.