Abstract
The sea ice cover in the Antarctic is one of the most climatically important features of the Southern Hemisphere. Its seasonal variation in extent is from 4 million km2 in summer (February) to 20 million km2 in winter (September) (Zwally et al. 1983). This enormous amplitude puts Antarctic sea ice second only to Northern Hemisphere snow extent as a seasonally varying cryospheric parameter. The cycle is reasonably stable from year to year; the most recent examination of filtered monthly anomalies (Folland et al. 1992) suggests that the extent diminished significantly (by about 2 million km2) between 1973 and 1980, then increased by 1 million km2 up to 1982 and has remained fairly constant since then (Fig. 1). The main features of the seasonal cycle are shown in Fig. 2 (after Comiso and Zwally 1989) for a typical recent year.
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Wadhams, P. (1994). The Antarctic Sea Ice Cover. In: Hempel, G. (eds) Antarctic Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-78711-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-78711-9_5
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