Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 01/16/2008 - 08:49
Forums
Antarctic Weather Stations

Hi Kirk, Shelley, Jonathan, George, Jonas, and the rest of the Team,

Thank you for sharing your expedition through the Webinar yesterday! Given the years of study and research experience that George, Jonathan and Shelley have regarding weather monitoring in Antarctica(as well as Greenland & Peru for George) and Kirk, -perhaps your work with the atmospheric chemist(s) mentioned on the project webpage, --what trends or changes in weather data stand out as being significant in your Antarctic research? I assume, -maybe incorrectly, that you have observed a warming trend at/in coastal areas and a cooling trend in inland areas.

Thank You, Be Well,

Ben Smith, Peninsula High School, Environmental Science Teacher, Rolling Hills, California 

Thu, 01/17/2008 - 11:39

Kirk Beckendorf

Hi Ben, Thanks for the questions. There are not really simple answers to those questions. I turned this over to George and here is his reply.
 
The most recent article is by the Byrd Polar Research Group at The OhiO State.
it is rather a technical paper but give a good summary of the current observations as compared with model output.
The broad view is of course the warming in the Peninsula and some cooling on the high plateau of East Antarctica. West Antactica is more problematic as mentioned in the article.
Complicating the picture is observed temperature changes due to other atmospheric "events" such as ENSO and the southern annular mode (SAM).
We have to be careful to note that for our automatic weather stations (AWS) the height above the surface that the temperature is measured decrease with time as snow accumulates at a site.  During the Antarctic winter,  a strong temperature inversion occurs near the surface. Here the the temperature gets warmer the higher one goes above the surface.  Hence, if the effective height of the temperature sensor is lower each year one "observes" a "cooling" until we return to the site and raise the sensor array.
The graphs at the end of the article are the latest comparisons of different estimates of temperature change around Antarctica.
There are other references given in the article.
From our AWS sites we have observed that El Nino events generally are associated with colder than normal temperatures on the Ross Ice Shelf.
Hope this is useful to you
George Weidner AWS project