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Why does the Antarctic Peninsula Warm in climate simulations?

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Abstract

The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed significantly since the 1950s. This pronounced and isolated warming trend is collectively captured by 29 twentieth-century climate hindcasts participating in the version 3 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. To understand the factors driving warming trends in the hindcasts, we examine trends in Peninsula region’s atmospheric heat budget in every simulation. We find that atmospheric latent heat release increases in nearly all hindcasts. These increases are generally anthropogenic in origin, and account for about 60% of the ensemble-mean warming trend in the Peninsula. They are driven primarily by well-understood features of the anthropogenic intensification of global hydrological cycle. As sea surface temperature increases, moisture contained in atmospheric flows increases. When such flows are forced to ascend the Peninsula’s topography, enhanced local latent heat release results. The mechanism driving the warming of the Antarctic Peninsula is therefore clear in the models. Evidence for a similar mechanism operating in the real world is seen in the increasing snow accumulation rates inferred from ice cores drilled in the Peninsula. However, the relative importance of this mechanism and other processes previously identified as potentially causing the observed warming, such as the recent sea ice retreat in the Bellingshausen Sea, is difficult to assess. Thus the relevance of the simulated warming mechanism to the observed warming is unclear, in spite of its robustness in the models.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NSF-0735056. We acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. We thank Drs. Andrew Monaghan and William Chapman for their help with the observational data sets, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms of our previous manuscript.

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  1. Julien Boé

    Present address: CNRS/CERFACS, URA 1875, Toulouse, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, PO BOX 951565, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1565, USA

    Xin Qu, Alex Hall & Julien Boé

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  1. Xin Qu
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  2. Alex Hall
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Correspondence to Xin Qu.

Appendix: Information on pre-industrial control experiments

Appendix: Information on pre-industrial control experiments

Some relevant information on pre-industrial control experiments is given in this appendix, including the lengths of the experiments and model drift in surface temperature and latent heat in the Antarctic Peninsula (Table 8).

Table 8 The magnitude of model drift in regionally-averaged surface temperature (K decade−1) and latent heat (W m−2 decade−1) in the Antarctic Peninsula in 12 climate models
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Qu, X., Hall, A. & Boé, J. Why does the Antarctic Peninsula Warm in climate simulations?. Clim Dyn 38, 913–927 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-011-1092-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-011-1092-3

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