pdf SCAR XXX WP14: Report on Antarctic Climate Evolution (ACE)

SCAR XXX WP14: Report on Antarctic Climate Evolution (ACE)

Rationale for ACE

ACE facilitates research in the broad area of Antarctic climate evolution over a variety of timescales. The programme links geophysical surveys and geological studies on and around the Antarctic continent with ice-sheet and climate modelling experiments. ACE is designed to determine both climate conditions and climatic changes during the recent past (i.e., the Holocene prior to anthropogenic impacts, as well as at the last glacial maximum and other Quaternary glacial intervals, when temperatures were cooler than at present) and the more distant past (i.e., the pre-Quaternary, when global temperatures were several degrees warmer than today). This new cross-disciplinary approach, involving climate and ice sheet modellers, geologists, and geophysicists will lead to a substantial improvement in the knowledge-base on past Antarctic climate, and our understanding of the factors that have guided its evolution. This in turn will allow us to build hypotheses, examinable through numerical modelling, as to how Antarctic climate is likely to respond to future global change. Equally important, the development of data-driven models for Antarctic climate will allow us to extend our results to the analysis and prediction of global climate variability.

Following the SCAR28 meeting in Bremen, ACE (Antarctic Climate Evolution) became a full Scientific Research Programme of SCAR. Since 2004 ACE has delivered outputs commensurate with its SRP status, and these are reported in this paper.