The seasonality of precipitation on the eastern Antarctic plateau (Dome-C) as derived from LIDAR and ICECAMERA

Antarctica's high latitudes are a challenging place to study precipitation. Despite this, direct monitoring of the habit and size of high-latitude precipitation is crucial for validating the algorithms used to derive precipitation information from radar, and for improving the climatological modeling of polar areas. Precipitation study is primarily done in coastal Antarctica (e.g. Grazioli et al.,2017 ), while the high plateau lacks long-term direct observation of precipitation. A first statistical analysis of precipitation at Concordia Station (-75°S, 123°E, Antarctica) was performed by Del Guasta et al (2024) making possible the study, over the period 2014-2021, of the habit-resolved size of ice crystals for ten representative ice habits, the altitude and temperature of formation, and the composition in terms of ice habits for different precipitation sources. In the present work, based on the same data set, the seasonal variations of habit-resolved grain size and habit composition were investigated. The seasonality of diamond dust's contribution to total precipitation was examined. The knowledge of the altitude of precipitation formation allowed the calculation of HYSPLIT backtrajectories for each precipitation event. For the first time, measurements instead of modeling were used to obtain the pathways of precipitation reaching Concordia Station. The seasonal variations of these pathways were also examined.