Image:Antarctic Climate Change.jpg

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Description

Global average temperature change. The average increase since 1970 is +0.18 °C / decade.

This figure shows the temperature trends since 1970 at 25 sites in Antarctica where temperature has been recorded at least 25 of the last 37 years. During this time, the only two continuously manned stations in the interior of Antarctica were Amundsen-Scott_Station at the South Pole and Vostok Station near the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility. The extremely harsh conditions during the six months of polar winter have prevented any other temperature stations (manned or unmanned) from operating over the long-term in the interior of the continent, hence all other long-term records come from coastal margins. This has severely limited the amount of information available about climate change in Antarctica and made it the most poorly instrumented of the continents.

As indicated in the figure, the Antarctic peninsula is strongly warming, well in excess of the global average warming during this period. Other regions show a mix of both warming and cooling, including conflicting trends at the two interior stations. As the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is expected to warm polar regions more rapidly than other areas, the evidence of cooling in some regions can be seen as unexpected.^[1] Others have argued that circulation changes produced by the formation of the ozone hole over Antarctica may explain many of the unexpected changes in Antarctic climate.^[2]^[3]

Data for the sites shown in this figure was taken from the GISTEMP collection.

Copyright

This image was produced by Robert A. Rohde from public data.

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References

^ [abstract] [full text] [DOI] Peter T. Doran, John C. Priscu, W. Berry Lyons, John E. Walsh, Andrew G. Fountain, Diane M. McKnight, Daryl L. Moorhead, Ross A. Virginia, Diana H. Wall, Gary D. Clow, Christian H. Fritsen, Christopher P. McKay and Andrew N. Parsons (2002). "Antarctic climate cooling and terrestrial ecosystem response". Nature 415: 517-520.
^ [abstract] [full text] [DOI] Thompson, David W. J. and Susan Solomon (2002). "Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change". Science 296 (5569): 895-899.
^ [abstract] [DOI] Shindell, Drew T. and Gavin A. Schmidt (2004). "Southern Hemisphere climate response to ozone changes and greenhouse gas increases". Geophysical Research Letters 31.