Significant warming of the Antarctic winter troposphere

We report an undocumented major warming of the Antarctic winter troposphere that is larger than any previously identified regional tropospheric warming on Earth. This result has come to light through an analysis of recently digitized and rigorously quality controlled Antarctic radiosonde observation...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science
Main Authors: Turner, J., Lachlan-Cope, T.A., Colwell, S.R., Marshall, G.J., Connolley, W.M.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science 2006
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Online Access:http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/144/
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1121652
Description
Summary:We report an undocumented major warming of the Antarctic winter troposphere that is larger than any previously identified regional tropospheric warming on Earth. This result has come to light through an analysis of recently digitized and rigorously quality controlled Antarctic radiosonde observations. The data show that regional midtropospheric temperatures have increased at a statistically significant rate of 0.5° to 0.7°Celsius per decade over the past 30 years. Analysis of the time series of radiosonde temperatures indicates that the data are temporally homogeneous. The available data do not allow us to unambiguously assign a cause to the tropospheric warming at this stage.