Antarctic Land Surface Temperature (part 2)

In this episode I produce time series slides of mean annual temperature for the three main categories of base location using slightly more ‘robust’ data than offered by the raw series

In part 1 of this series I kicked-off by looking at data quality of the GHCN daily data series. What should be obvious by now is that there are not that many weather stations in Antarctica and that data collection among these is pretty patchy at the best of times. As a result it is quite possible to derive annual mean land surface temperatures that are rather wild and misleading.

In this article we’re going to get a handle on the impact of base location on land surface temperature and I shall start by plotting out the annual mean land surface temperature for those 29 coastal stations who’ve managed to maintain 50% or greater daily data capture over time. This is not exactly ‘robust’ by any means but if I push the data quality issue too far then we end up with nothing much to look at! Try this for size:

Coastal Bases (0 – 20km from nearest coast)

Isn’t that super interesting? We have four groups of bases and I can reveal the warmest of these that are crayoned in red and green are those th…