ALBERT

Description: In the early 1980s, Germany started a new era of modern Antarctic research. The Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) was founded and important research platforms such as the German permanent station in Antarctica, today called Neumayer III, and the research icebreaker Polarstern were installed. The research primarily focused on the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. In parallel, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) started a priority program ‘Antarctic Research’ (since 2003 called SPP-1158) to foster and intensify the cooperation between scientists from different German universities and the AWI as well as other institutes involved in polar research. Here, we review the main findings in meteorology and oceanography of the last decade, funded by the priority program. The paper presents field observations and modelling efforts, extending from the stratosphere to the deep ocean. The research spans a large range of temporal and spatial scales, including the interaction of both climate components. In particular, radiative processes, the interaction of the changing ozone layer with large-scale atmospheric circulations, and changes in the sea ice cover are discussed. Climate and weather forecast models provide an insight into the water cycle and the climate change signals associated with synoptic cyclones. Investigations of the atmospheric boundary layer focus on the interaction between atmosphere, sea ice and ocean in the vicinity of polynyas and leads. The chapters dedicated to polar oceanography review the interaction between the ocean and ice shelves with regard to the freshwater input and discuss the changes in water mass characteristics, ventilation and formation rates, crucial for the deepest limb of the global, climate-relevant meridional overturning circulation. They also highlight the associated storage of anthropogenic carbon as well as the cycling of carbon, nutrients and trace metals in the ocean with special emphasis on the Weddell Sea.

Description: The North Atlantic cold bias, associated with the misplacement of the North Atlantic Current (NAC) and typically extending from the surface to 1000 m depth, is a common problem in coupled models that compromises model fidelity. We investigate the use of a flow field correction (FFC) to adjust the path of the NAC and alleviate the cold bias. The FFC consists of three steps. First, climatological potential temperature (T) and salinity (S) fields for use with the model are produced using a three-dimensional restoring technique. Second, these T, S fields are used to modify the momentum equations of the ocean model. In the third stage, the correction term is diagnosed to construct a flow-independent correction. Results using the Kiel Climate Model show that the FFC allows the establishment of a northwest corner, substantially alleviating the subsurface cold bias. A cold bias remains at the surface but can be eliminated by additionally correcting the surface freshwater flux, without adjusting the surface heat flux seen by the ocean model. A model version in which only the surface fluxes of heat and freshwater are corrected continues to exhibit the incorrect path of the NAC and a strong subsurface bias. We also show that the bias in the atmospheric circulation is reduced in some corrected model versions. The FFC can be regarded as a way to correct for model error, e.g. associated with the deep water mass pathways and their impact on the large-scale ocean circulation, and unresolved processes such as eddy momentum flux convergence.