MOAT Project Officially Launched!
Sea level rise is one of the most pressing consequences of climate change, and Antarctica is at the heart of our uncertainties. Ice shelves — the floating extensions of the ice sheet that fringe 75% of the Antarctic coastline — act as natural buttresses, slowing the flow of ice into the ocean. When they weaken or collapse, the consequences for global sea levels can be significant. Yet the processes that drive this weakening remain poorly understood, and current ice sheet models struggle to represent them accurately.
This is precisely what the MOAT project (Melting ice shelves Of AntarcTica), funded by Belspo, aims to address. The consortium brings together ULB, KU Leuven and VUB to directly observe basal melting, surface melting and ice shelf rheology on the Roi Baudouin Ice Shelf (East Antarctica) — a site with nearly two decades of existing measurements, making it ideal for tracking how melt intensity and patterns have evolved over time.
What the VUB team is deploying on the ground
Our contribution at VUB focuses on in-situ instrumentation to characterise the surface conditions and snow properties associated with surface melt events. At VUB, we will have a postdoc joining me on this topic for two years, in addition to my own work on the project.
WISe snow moisture probe A key instrument we are deploying is the WISe snow moisture probe, which directly measures liquid water content in the snowpack. Surface meltwater infiltration and refreezing within the snow are critical but poorly constrained processes that alter the structural integrity of ice shelves. Having direct, continuous measurements of snow moisture at the surface will provide a dataset that, to our knowledge, is rarely collected in Antarctica — and that is essential for understanding how melt pulses propagate through the snowpack.
Temporary Automatic Weather Station (AWS) Alongside this, we are setting up a temporary AWS at our target measurement site. The station will be equipped with a vertical array of temperature sensors to capture the thermal profile of the snow and ice, as well as standard meteorological variables (air temperature, humidity, snow height, wind, radiation). The goal is simple but critical: to have continuous, high-resolution atmospheric and surface conditions collocated with our melt observations. Without knowing what the atmosphere was doing at the exact location of our measurements, interpreting radar and photonic sensor data becomes much harder.
From field data to better climate models
The data collected on the ground will not just sit in a database. A central objective of MOAT is to use these in-situ measurements to improve the representation of surface melt processes in the MAR regional climate model — the model our team works with and develops. Surface melt in MAR is currently parameterised with limited observational constraints from Antarctica, particularly regarding how meltwater infiltrates, refreezes and accumulates within the snowpack. The WISe moisture data and the AWS temperature profiles will directly feed into this work, allowing us to evaluate and refine how MAR simulates the surface energy budget and snowpack evolution over Antarctic ice shelves.
Better-constrained surface melt processes in MAR will in turn improve projections of the Antarctic ice sheet’s contribution to sea level rise — a key input for future IPCC assessments and ice sheet modelling efforts under CMIP7/ISMIP7.
The instrumentation is currently being finalised and will be shipped to Antarctica ahead of the upcoming austral summer season. Stay tuned for updates from the field.