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Abstract

The surface melting of snowpacks, firns, and glaciers is controlled by their complex surface energy balance. Among the modelling frameworks used to represent this process, the so-called skin layer formulation is regularly employed as it has a low numerical cost, and enables an explicit definition of a surface temperature and a surface melt rate. Yet, its traditional implementation in snowpack, firn, or glacier models relies on a sequential treatment of the surface energy and internal energy budgets. To circumvent this limitation, we propose an alternative numerical scheme that rigorously couples the treatment of the surface and the interior energy budgets, and that can be implemented in existing models without significant increase in the numerical cost. Based on simple test cases, we show that the surface melt predicted by the standard skin layer surface formulation can significantly deviate from the fully-coupled approach.