As part of the activities of the TEAMx sub working group on glaciers, the second iteration of the HinterEisFerner EXperiment (HEFEX II) was carried out on Hintereisferner during the summer of 2023. The three week campaign successfully operated multi-level 3D sonic anemometers across ten on-glacier weather stations, alongside low frequency weather sensors that were also operating on an additional nine weather stations distributed along the glacier centerline, yielding unprecedented observations of the glacier boundary layer.
Here we present first insights on how these observations deepen our understanding of the glacier boundary layer and its connection to the wider valley atmosphere. We describe the spatio-temporal variation of the glacier microclimatic properties and its relation to the katabatic wind. The findings facilitate accurate extrapolation of glacier surface energy balance for distributed glacier melt modelling and provide validation data for high resolution atmospheric modelling of the glaciated valley atmosphere.