Exploring the coupled ocean and atmosphere system with a data science approach applied to observations from the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition ...

• Main Authors: Landwehr, Sebastian, Volpi, Michele, Haumann, Alexander, Robinson, Charlotte M., Thurnherr, Iris, Ferracci, Valerio, Baccarini, Andrea, Thomas, Jenny, Gorodetskaya, Irina, Tatzelt, Christian, Henning, Silvia, Modini, Rob L., Forrer, Heather J., Lin, Yajuan, Cassar, Nicolas, Simó, Rafel, Hassler, Christel, Moallemi, Alireza, Fawcett, Sarah E., Harris, Neil, Airs, Ruth, Derkani, Marzieh, Albarello, Alberto, Toffoli, Alessandro, Chen, Gang, Perez-Cruz, Fernando, Schmale, Julia, et al.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: ETH Zurich 2021
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctic; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000518876; http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/518876

The Southern Ocean is a critical component of Earth's climate system, but its remoteness makes it challenging to develop a holistic understanding of its processes from the small scale to the large scale. As a result, our knowledge of this vast region remains largely incomplete. The Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE, austral summer 2016/2017) surveyed a large number of variables describing the state of the ocean and the atmosphere, the freshwater cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and ocean biogeochemistry and microbiology. This circumpolar cruise included visits to 12 remote islands, the marginal ice zone, and the Antarctic coast. Here, we use 111 of the observed variables to study the latitudinal gradients, seasonality, shorter-term variations, geographic setting of environmental processes, and interactions between them over the duration of 90 d. To reduce the dimensionality and complexity of the dataset and make the relations between variables interpretable we applied an unsupervised machine learning ... : Earth System Dynamics, 12 (4) ...