West Antarctic warming triggered by warmer sea surface in tropical Pacific

Vince Stricherz in the University of Washington News: The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed rapidly for the last half-century or more, and recent studies have shown that an adjacent area, continental West Antarctica, has steadily warmed for at least 30 years, but scientists haven’t been sure why.

New University of Washington research shows that rising sea surface temperatures in the area of the Pacific Ocean along the equator and near the International Date Line drive atmospheric circulation that has caused some of the largest shifts in Antarctic climate in recent decades. The warmer water generates rising air that creates a large wave structure in the atmosphere called a Rossby wave train, which brings warmer temperatures to West Antarctica during winter and spring.

Antarctica is somewhat isolated by the vast Southern Ocean, but the new results “show that it is still affected by climate changes elsewhere on the planet,” said Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the UW Quaternary Research Center.

…“This is distinct from El Niño,” Steig said. That climate phenomenon, which affects weather patterns worldwide, primarily influences sea-surface temperatures farther east in the Pacific, nearer to South America. It can be, but isn’t always, associated with strong warming in the central Pacific.

Steig noted that the influence of Rossby waves on West Antarctic climate is not a new idea, but this is the first time such waves have been shown to be associated with long-term changes in Antarctic temperature. The findings also could have implications for understanding the causes behind the thinning of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains about 10 percent of all the ice in Antarctica….

Pine Island Bay is tucked into a corner of the West Antarctic’s Walgreen Coast. The bay, which opens to the Amundsen Sea, is typically filled with sea ice at this time of year, but when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite passed overhead on March 14, 2010, the bay was largely ice-free.