Temporal Variability of Antarctic Katabatic Winds: climatology, driving mechanisms and impact on the water cycle – KATABATIC

Surface winds over Antarctica are among the strongest and most persistent on Earth. These winds profoundly shape the surface conditions on the ice sheet, breaking the surface temperature inversion, and transporting snow. Coupled climate models used for IPCC projections have too low resolution to reproduce the katabatic forcing, and as a result, projections assume that katabatic winds are stationary in time. However, there are too few sustained observations to precisely describe the temporal variability of Antarctic surface winds.
Here we propose to give new insight on surface wind variability by (1) developing a proxy for wind intensity in ice cores and providing the first wind reconstruction at decadal scale for the past 1000 years, (2) studying the drivers of surface wind intensity and the impact of climate change in the polar oriented regional model MAR, and (3) providing new observational constraints on the impact of katabatic winds on the near surface snow and moisture transport.