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Abstract:
One of the strange things about anthropogenic climate change is that the Arctic is warming a lot more than Antarctica. Some of these differences can be attributed to the two regions’ vastly different regional geographies and the opposing influences of large areas of land and sea. Actually, in many parts of the Antarctic continent, it is not clear that there is any warming trend at all. This is partly due to the short instrumental record and that very large natural internal climate variability may be masking some anthropogenic trends. In this context, in order to understand the fate of the Antarctic ice sheet, and possible sea level rise, it is particularly important to precisely quantify internal climate variability, and study its mechanisms. This has been the scope of the PAGES-2k working group for more than a decade. Following extensive database work to reconstruct temperature variability over the past 2000 years, from water isotopes in an array of ice cores, PAGES-2k is now turning to reconstructing hydroclimate variability. In Antarctica, precipitation variability is dominated by the presence or absence of just a few extreme events per year. These extreme precipitation events are dynamically linked to atmospheric blocking. In this work, we review ice core evidence for atmospheric blocking variability around Antarctica, and lay the foundation for a new generation of multi-site multi-proxy reconstructions of Antarctic climate variability for the past 2000 years. This work is supported by PAGES-2k, and you are welcome to get involved.
