Antarctica: Barometer of Climate Change

Abstract

Antarctica plays a central role in global climate variability and change, but sustained efforts to illuminate its critical linkages to lower latitudes are lacking. A conjunction of new observational capabilities, advances in scientific understanding, and improving numerical models allow the question of the global relevance of Antarctica to be explored in detail for the first time. The first step is a comprehensive atmospheric study of the South Pacific sector of Antarctica (the SPAN project). This sector includes the Ross Sea region, an area that is closely coupled to the global atmosphere on a variety of time scales. Three aspects will be addressed: the forcing of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon in Antarctica; the impacts of Antarctica on lower latitudes which are most pronounced over and adjacent to the western Pacific Ocean; and the testing and refinement near Ross Island (the RIME project) of coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean numerical models that are required for global simulations that realistically incorporate Antarctica.