Snow is a dominating factor in sea-ice mass balance in the Bellingshausen Sea through its roles in insulating the ice and contributing to snow-ice production. The wind has long been qualitatively recognized to impact the distribution of snow accumulation on sea ice, but the relative importance of drifting and blowing snow have not been quantified previously in this environment. The presence and magnitude of drifting snow were monitored continuously along with wind speeds at two sites on an ice floe in the Bellingshausen Sea during the October 2007 Sea Ice Mass Balance in Antarctica (SIMBA) experiment. These drifting snow measurements are the first of their kind collected over sea ice on the Southern Ocean. This high-resolution record of drifting and blowing snow is combined with contemporaneous precipitation measurements collected on board the adjacent RV Nathaniel B. Palmer and accumulation measurements collected at the same two sites on the sea ice by automated ice mass-balance buoys (IMBs). The combination of these three types of instrumental records allows us to document the proportion of snowfall that accumulated on level ice surfaces in the presence of high winds and blowing snow conditions during a discrete interval of time. Accumulation on the sea ice during the 21 day drift experiment averaged approximately 1 cm w.e. at both IMB sites, while ECMWF analyses predicted 3 cm w.e. of precipitation over the ice floe during that time. Significant changes in accumulation measured on the ice floe are clearly associated with drifting snow and high winds. Precipitation events in the absence of high winds resulted in temporarily increased snow depths at the IMB sites that were rapidly eroded following the resumption of wind speeds greater than 10 m s^–1. To place these results in a regional and temporal context, we model the snow accumulation prior to the SIMBA experiment for comparison with in situ and satellite estimates. These model-data comparisons are then used to quantify the proportion of precipitation that did not accumulate but was lost through wind redistribution.