West Antarctic Composite Temperature Records

The intent of this research was to define a new technique that can be widely applied at other Antarctic and Greenland sites. This effort builds on a previously published emissivity modeling technique that uses only air temperature, TA, and passive microwave brightness temperature, TB, data (e.g. Shuman et al., 1995) and recently developed infrared temperature, TIR, data sets (e.g. Comiso 2000). All three types of data have various limitations: 1) the TA record is relatively short and may have data gaps; 2) the TIR record requires calibration and has data gaps due to clouds; and 3) the TB record requires calibration especially due to periods of emissivity variability related to melt events. Emphasis was also placed on understanding the uncertainty of the resulting temperature record so that confidence in these data could be maximized. The resulting data set provides a daily-average temperature time series for the sites in West Antarctica with constrained uncertainties. It effectively minimizes the limitations of all three types of input data. The time series covers more than 20 years as it begins in 1981 and extends through 2001. Daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual average values have been calculated