Mapping the Antarctic Polar Front: Weekly realizations from 2002 to 2014, links to NetCDF file and MPEG4 movie ...

• Main Authors: Freeman, Natalie M, Lovenduski, Nicole S
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2016
• Subjects: File content; File format; File size; Uniform resource locator/link to raw data file; Antarc*; Antarctic; Drake Passage; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.855640; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.855640

We map the weekly position of the Antarctic Polar Front (PF) in the Southern Ocean over a 12-year period (2002–2014) using satellite sea surface temperature (SST) estimated from cloud-penetrating microwave radiometers. Our study advances previous efforts to map the PF using hydrographic and satellite data and provides a unique realization of the PF at weekly resolution across all longitudes. The mean path of the PF is asymmetric; its latitudinal position spans from 44 to 64° S along its circumpolar path. SST at the PF ranges from 0.6 to 6.9 °C, reflecting the large spread in latitudinal position. The average intensity of the front is 1.7 °C per 100 km, with intensity ranging from 1.4 to 2.3 °C per 100 km. Front intensity is significantly correlated with the depth of bottom topography, suggesting that the front intensifies over shallow bathymetry. Realizations of the PF are consistent with the corresponding surface expressions of the PF estimated using expendable bathythermograph data in the Drake Passage and ... : Processing version 2015.1.1 indicates solely that additional metadata (e.g., \'time_stamp\') has been added to version 2015.1 for enhanced user-friendliness; the original data from version 2015.1 has NOT been modified. ...