The Atmospheric Circulation and Arctic Meteorology

• Main Author: F. Kenneth Hare
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Gavrilova; Greenland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.511.2301; http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic22-3-185.pdf

In a sense this title contains a fallacy. Meteorology is the most global of all sciences in outlook, and it can be argued that there is no longer any such thing as arctic meteorology, at least in the free atmosphere. Fifteen years ago this was not so. We knew so little of the atmospheric circulation near the pole that it was legitimate to use the title, as I did when in 1954 I founded the Arctic Meteorology Research Group at McGill University (around a program of research transferred from the University of California at Los Angeles). The purpose of our research, and of a sister group at the University of Washington under R. J. Reed, was to bring an understanding of the role of the Arctic into the mainstream of meteorological knowledge. This has now been achieved, and the title is hence anachronistic. Although it is no longer valid to talk of a specifically arctic meteorology, it is still true that the Arctic plays a special role in the planetary climate, in at least three domains. At the ice/atmosphere interface over the Arctic Ocean and Greenland the very special energy rCgime is crucial to the present global climate. This rkgime has been the special interest of a group of meteorologists including F. I. Badgley, M. I. Budyko, Y. P. Doronin, J. 0. Fletcher, M. K. Gavrilova, M. S. Marshunova