Antarctic?

• Main Authors: A. J. Mcdonald, S. E. George, R. M. Wooll
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.602.5408; http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/9/8825/2009/acp-9-8825-2009.pdf

Abstract. A combination of POAM III aerosol extinction and CHAMP RO temperature measurements are used to ex-amine the role of atmospheric gravity waves in the formation of Antarctic Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSCs). POAM III aerosol extinction observations and quality flag information are used to identify Polar Stratospheric Clouds using an un-supervised clustering algorithm. A PSC proxy, derived by thresholding Met Office tem-perature analyses with the PSC Type Ia formation tempera-ture (TNAT), shows general agreement with the results of the POAM III analysis. However, in June the POAM III obser-vations of PSC are more abundant than expected from tem-perature threshold crossings in five out of the eight years ex-amined. In addition, September and October PSC identified using temperature thresholding is often significantly higher