MetUM and HIRHAM5 simulations of summer near-surface temperatures over Antarctica from 1979 to 2019

High-resolution hindcasts (1979-2019) of summer climate over Antarctica using the UK Met Office Unified Model (MetUM) and HIRHAM5 were conducted at the British Antarctic Survey and Danish Meteorological Institute, respectively. The hindcasts are conducted for summer 1979-2018, i.e., from December 1979 to February 2019, for December, January, February (DJF). This dataset consists of near-surface temperature output from these hindcasts at a temporal resolution of every 3 hrs. The hindcasts are contributions to the COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) project. Both models are run over Antarctic CORDEX domains, which encompass all of Antarctica and some of the surrounding ocean, at a horizontal grid spacing of around 12 km. The near-surface temperatures are used to estimate regional surface melt "potential" over Antarctic ice shelves as a function of summertime temperature extremes and identify regions of potentially enhanced "hotspots" of melt potential based on the occurrence (and magnitude) of various temperatures.

Funding was provided by the European Union''s Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework programme under Grant agreement no. 101003590 (PolarRES)

Alternate title: Polar Data Centre (PDC) record GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01662

Date (Publication): 2022-09-12

Citation identifier: http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/dms/metadata.php?id= / GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01662

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Antarctic Survey		pdc@bas.ac.uk	Custodian
NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre	Orr, A., Boberg, F., & Phillips, T.	pdc@bas.ac.uk	Originator

Maintenance and update frequency: Unknown

Keywords

NDGO0001

NERC OAI Harvesting

NERC_DDC

GCMD Parameter Valids

EARTH SCIENCE > Atmosphere > Atmospheric Temperature
EARTH SCIENCE > Atmosphere > Atmospheric Temperature > Surface Air Temperature

BAS Free-text keywords

HIRHAM5
MetUM
Polar CORDEX
high-resolution atmospheric modelling
hindcast

Use limitation: Data supplied under Open Government Licence v3.0 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/.

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Data supplied under Open Government Licence v3.0 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/.

Distance: 0.11 degrees (~12 k km

Language: English

Topic category

Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere

Begin date: 1979-12-01

End date: 2019-02-28

Reference system identifier: OGP / urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::4326

Distribution format

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
Polar Data Centre - British Antarctic Survey		pdc@bas.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
http	https://ramadda.data.bas.ac.uk/repository/entry/show?entryid=05f8bd4b-97b1-43d0-a1c6-66aea7021aaf	GET DATA

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Domain consistency

Measure identification: INSPIRE / Conformity_001

Conformance result

Title: INSPIRE Data Specification on unknown theme Guidelines

Date

Explanation: See the referenced specification

Pass: No

Statement: Summer daily maximum temperatures derived from both the MetUM and HIRHAM5 hindcasts were compared in a statistical analysis with observations from twenty weather stations situated either on or close to Antarctic ice shelves. This comparison showed that the MetUM simulated temperatures were characterised by a) a cold bias for fifteen out of the twenty stations, which for ten of the stations was less than 1 K, b) a root-mean-square-error of 2-3 K, and c) a correlation from 0.62-0.91. The HIRHAM5 summer daily maximum temperatures typically have a larger cold bias, larger root-mean-square-error, and lower correlation than the MetUM results. The relatively good performance of the MetUM (and to a lesser extent HIRHAM5) suggests that daily maximum temperatures over Antarctic ice shelves derived from these model outputs are broadly representative of actual conditions.