Time series of atmospheric river events affecting Antarctica
Description of the data
This dataset provides atmospheric river (AR) shapes south of 50ºS latitude. The shapes were identified using the algorithm by Wille et al (2021), where two approaches are available: 1) based on integrated water vapour (IWV) and 2) based on the meridional component of integrated vapour transport (vIVT). The algorithm inputs – IWV and vIVT – are calculated using the ERA5 reanalysis products (vertical profiles of specific humidity and meridional wind component on pressure levels, from 1000hPa or the nearest surface level to 200 hPa).
The algorithm has been applied to evaluate the impact of the ARs on precipitation (Wille et al., 2021), surface melt (Wille et al., 2019, 2022), both precipitation and temperature records during specific cases (Gorodetskaya et al., 2023) and in connection with modes of variability influencing precipitation over Antarctica (Shields et al., 2022).
Acknowledgements
The European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting is thanked for providing the ERA5 datasets. Projects ARCA (funded by ANR, France) and ATLACE (funded by FCT, Portugal).