A multidisciplinary perspective on climate model evaluation for Antarctica

• Published in: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
• Main Authors: Bracegirdle, TJ, Bertler, NAN, Carleton, AM, Ding, Q, Fogwill, CJ, Fyfe, JC, Hellmer, HH, Karpechko, AY, Kusahara, K, Larour, E, Mayewski, PA, Meier, WN, Polvani, LM, Russell, JL, Stevenson, SL, Turner, J, van Wessem, JM, van de Berg, WJ, Wainer, I
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Amer Meteorological Soc 2016
• Subjects: Earth Sciences; Atmospheric Sciences; Climate Change Processes; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; Antarc*; Antarctica; SCAR; Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00108.1; http://ecite.utas.edu.au/109885

Over the twenty-first century, large changes in climate are projected for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean under scenarios of greenhouse gas increase and stratospheric ozone recovery. These changes would potentially have important environmental and societal implications, affecting, for example, sea level change, global ocean heat and carbon uptake, and ecosystem function. However, our ability to make precise estimates of these impacts is hampered by uncertainties in state-of-the-art climate models. Model evaluation is a key step in reducing this model uncertainty by helping to identify biases and shortcomings common to the current generation of models and highlighting priorities for future model development. The evaluation of climate models representation of Antarctic climate from the perspective of long-term twenty-first-century climate change was the subject of a workshop organized by Antarctic Climate 21 (AntClim21), one of six current scientific research programs of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR; see www.scar.org/srp/antclim21 ).