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Central antarctic climate response to the solar cycle

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Abstract

Antarctic “Vostok” station works most closely to the center of the ice cap among permanent year-around stations. Climate conditions are exclusively stable: low precipitation level, cloudiness and wind velocity. These conditions can be considered as an ideal model laboratory to study the surface temperature response on solar irradiance variability during 11-year cycle of solar activity. Here we solve an inverse heat conductivity problem: calculate the boundary heat flux density (HFD) from known evolution of temperature. Using meteorological temperature record during (1958–2011) we calculated the HFD variation about 0.2–0.3 W/m2 in phase with solar activity cycle. This HFD variation is derived from 0.5 to 1 °C temperature variation and shows relatively high climate sensitivity per 0.1 % of solar radiation change. This effect can be due to the polar amplification phenomenon, which predicts a similar response 0.3–0.8 °C/0.1 % (Gal-Chen and Schneider in Tellus 28:108–121, 1975). The solar forcing (TSI) is disturbed by volcanic forcing (VF), so that their linear combination TSI + 0.5VF empirically provides higher correlation with HFD (r = 0.63 ± 0.22) than TSI (r = 0.50 ± 0.24) and VF (r = 0.41 ± 0.25) separately. TSI shows higher wavelet coherence and phase agreement with HFD than VF.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to both anonymous Referees for thoughtful reading of the manuscript and useful suggestions. I thank AARI and RAE teams for making meteorological data for Vostok available online, as well I thank cited Authors of TSI and VFs reconstructions. Wavelet coherence software http://noc.ac.uk/using-science/crosswavelet-wavelet-coherence was provided by A. Grinsted. Special thank to my colleagues from 43rd RAE winter at Vostok. The work was supported by grants: Program of Presidium of Russian Academy of Science N 22, Russian Foundation for Basic Research N 10-02-00391-a, 11-02-00755-a and Scientific School-1625.2012.2.

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  1. Pulkovo Observatory, 196140, Pulkovskoe sh. 65/1, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    D. M. Volobuev

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  1. D. M. Volobuev
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Correspondence to D. M. Volobuev.

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Volobuev, D.M. Central antarctic climate response to the solar cycle. Clim Dyn 42, 2469–2475 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1925-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1925-3

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