Available rawinsonde, automatic weather station (AWS), ship, and synthesized long-term observations are used to evaluate the Antarctic numerical analyses of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) from 1985 to 1994. Twice-daily variations in the ECMWF surface pressure analyses compare closely with AWS units...

The ongoing loss of Arctic sea-ice cover has implications for the wider climate system. The detection and importance of the atmospheric impacts of sea-ice loss depends, in part, on the relative magnitudes of the sea-ice forced change compared to natural atmospheric internal variability (AIV). This study analyses large ensembles of two independent atmospheric general circulation models in order ...

Atmospheric blocking events are known to locally explain a large part of climate variability. However, despite their relevance, many current climate models still struggle to represent the observed blocking statistics. In this study, simulations of the global climate model EC-Earth are analysed with respect to atmospheric blocking. Seventeen simulations map the uncertainty space defined by the t...

Airborne measurement of the horizontal pressure field using differential GPS technology has been established during the last few years. Accurate aircraft measurement of the horizontal pressure gradient force requires an independent determination of the height of the airborne platform above some reference level. Here the authors demonstrate a differential GPS technique that uses data from a fixe...

At least four different modeling studies indicate that variability in snow cover over Asia may modulate atmospheric circulation over the North Pacific Ocean during winter. Here, satellite data on snow extent for east Asia for 1971–95 along with atmospheric fields from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research reanalysis are used to examine whethe...

A new seawater Boussinesq system is introduced, and it is shown that this approximation to the equations of motion of a compressible binary solution has an energy conservation law that is a consistent approximation to the Bernoulli equation of the full system. The seawater Boussinesq approximation simplifies the mass conservation equation to $ u 5 0, employs the nonlinear equation of state of s...