The nature of the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave and its connections with Australian rainfall variability

Metadata record for data from ASAC Project 1329 See the link below for public details on this project.

---- Public Summary from Project----

The Antarctic Circumpolar Wave is a mode of high latitude variability involving the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice. Some research indicates it has a period of about 5 years but the robustness and persistence has yet to be fully established. This project will examine the nature of the ACW in a long data series, and will determine whether the wave is related to Australian rainfall.

In this project, sea ice data were sourced from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (CIRES, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0449, USA). The NCEP reanalysis data set was sourced from: NOAA/ National Weather Service, National Centers for Environmental Prediction (5200 Auth Road, Camp Springs, Maryland, 20746 USA).

Australian rainfall data were taken from Jones and Weymouth (1997: An Australian Monthly Rainfall Dataset. Technical Report No. 70, Bureau of Meteorology, 19 pp.) compilation and provided digitally by the Bureau of Meteorology.

The sea ice concentration data used were for the Antarctic only (the entire Antarctic sea ice domain). Data started in 1978. All data were collected by satellite. A link to a metadata record for these data are available from the URL given below.

Two NCEP reanalysis data sets were used in this study. The first was NCEP/NCAR, with 6-hourly data available from 1958 (see the URL provided below for further information). The second was the NCEP/DOE set, with 6-hourly data available from 1979 (see the URL provided below for further information).

In this project the following model/analysis was applied:

Application of The University of Melbourne cyclone tracking scheme (Simmonds et al., 2003, Monthly Weather Review, 131, 272-288) and a broad range of statistical tests. Brief details are provided in the Summary. See the link for the pdf document for more detailed information.

These complex statistical analyses were run over the entire length of the project (2001/02 - 2003/04). They were run on the Sun Workstation cluster in the School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne.