New research finds significant warming of Ross Sea region

University of Canterbury - PhD candidate Eva Nielsen created a new dataset of Antarctica’s temperature over the past 20 years analysing its trends and temperature extremes as part of her research.

Nielsen, who moved from Denmark to New Zealand to study Antarctic Studies at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury's School of Earth and Environment, says Antarctica will experience significant changes due to global warming.

“Changes in the local climate can lead to an increase in melt, affecting ice-shelf stability and biodiversity, in the region but to study these effects, scientists need detailed temperature data,” Nielsen says

Her dataset is crucial for understanding local temperature extremes and variations that aren’t well captured by existing models.

“One of the big issues we have with understanding temperatures and their trends across Antarctica is that we don't have a lot of data. Antarctica is such a big continent and getting any data is difficult due to its remoteness and harsh environment,” says Nielsen.

“Weather stations are useful, but the problem is they don't give us the spatial information we need.” She says temperatures can vary a lot with factors like elevation. “If you walk five kilometers from a weather station you can get different temperatures.”

Nielsen created a unique dataset called AntAir ICE, covering detailed information from 2003 to 2021 on temperatures of Antarctica and its surrounding ice shelves using satellite imagery. Using this tool, Nielsen and her team analysed temperature trends and extremes over that period.

“Most importantly, we found that the Ross Sea region is warming a lot, and it's a significant warming, both in the summer mean and the annual mean and we’re the first to find that. We also found the Antarctic Peninsula is cooling, which agrees with a lot of the other research and that parts of Eastern Antarctica were cooling at a significant trend.”

“We also identified extreme temperatures and mapped these with the circulation patterns associated with these temperature extremes,” she says.

Read the University of Canterbury media release in full.