Spatial variability in the chemical composition of the snowcover at high alpine sites

Summary For a comparison of snow chemistry data from different glaciers or snow fields it is important to have informations about the spatial representativeness of the data from each of the individual sites. In order to assess the representativeness of concentration data of major ions (volume weighted means of the winter accumulation) from glacier fields we investigated the variability in the average concentration of major ions from parallel samples within one snow pit and from different pits within one glacier field. The variabilities in the average concentrations of NO₃^-, SO₄^2- and NH₄⁺ for three parallel profiles within one snow pit at Goldbergkees (Austria) were 1.2, 3.3 and 2.0% (coefficient of variation). Cl^– and Na⁺ showed larger variations (6.6 and 56.6%) possibly originating from contaminations. The variability of average concentration data from different snow pits within one glacier field was studied at La Grave (France) and at Goldbergkees (Austria). At La Grave 3 pits and at Goldbergkees 4 pits at distance of several hundred meters were sampled. Variabilities for SO₄^2- and NO₃^- were quite similar for the two sites (17% for both ions at La Grave, 12% and 15% at Goldbergkees). Whereas variabilities for Na⁺, NH₄⁺, Mg²⁺, Ca²⁺ and Cl^– were quite low at La Grave ( 12% and 27% for Cl^–), higher values were obtained at Goldbergkees for these ions (17–56%). Likely reasons for the higher variability observed at Goldbergkees are a) higher spatial variability of crustal aerosol species (Mg²⁺, Ca²⁺), b) problems with the detection limit of the analytical method (Ca²⁺), c) contaminations (Na⁺, Cl^–).With 4 Figures