1. The Öræfajökull precipitation experiment - ÖREX
Hálfdán Ágústsson123 , Haraldur Ólafsson234. Marius O. Jonassen4, Ólafur Örn Haraldsson, Hugo Mencoboni5, Sylvain Laporte5, Margot Pouget5 and Léon Jourdain5.
(1) Institute for Meteorological Research, Iceland, (2) University of Iceland, (3) Icelandic Meteorological Office, (4) Bergen school of Meteorology, University of Bergen, Norway, (5) Ecole des mines d'Albi, France.
ÖREX, the Öræfajökull precipitation experiment, started in July 2010, when 27 small automatic rain gauges (HOBOs), were placed near Hnappavellir in the south of the glacier covered Öræfajökull ice cap, Iceland’s highest mountain (2111 m a.s.l.). The rain gauges were placed in a grid with an average spacing of 1 km, over a distance of about 10 km, running from the coast to an altitude of 1100 m, at the maximum glacial extent on the mountain. The gauges were operational during the summer and autumn of 2010 and recorded several large orographic precipitation events. The gauges were successfully retrieved again in the summer of 2011, except for a few which had been attacked by the notorious killer sheep of Öræfi. The high spatio-temporal observational data is being analyzed and compared to atmospheric analysis and other available observations of weather. Chosen events of interest are analyzed further based on the results from high-resolution atmospheric simulations.
Iceland 5
Mt. Öræfajökull
2111 m
Above: Topography and the planned sites of the rain gauges. One gauge is 5 km of the map to the south (O43). Below: Actual locations of rain gauges with any useful data. A number of rain gauges were lost due to weather, technical problems and curious livestock.
Left: Time series from all the rain gauges giving any useful data (map to the right). Some of the rain gauges of had technical problems early during the experiment, e.g. O49, while the uppermost gauges were retrieved earlier than other gauges. Typical precipitation patterns are shown below.
WIND SPEED < 5m/s
WESTERLY WINDS < 5m/s
SOUTHERLY WINDS < 5m/s
EASTERLY WINDS
View to the north from a lowland station at approx. 15 m. Photo: Hálfdán Ágústsson.
View to the south from the uppermost station at approx m. Taken after the first snow when the gauge was retrieved. Photo: Einar Rúnar Sigurðsson.
View to the east from the easternmost lowland station (O51) at approx. 20 m.
Photo: Hálfdán Ágústsson.
HOBO rain gauge
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