Abstract:

Several operational global and regional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models have been used as the major tools for real-time weather forecast and climate diagnostics studies in Antarctica. The models nowadays have relative poor skill in simulating the broadscale circulation and weather systems of Antarctica. The reasons consist of (1) the particularity of the weather and climate over Antarctica, including the parameterization of the boundary layer and mesoscale cyclones, (2) poor representation of Antarctic topography and surface features, (3) inadequate initial conditions resulting from the sparse observational network. However, owing to the further study of the Antarctic general circulation of atmosphere and higher resolution of models and increasing varied observation data, NWP models for Antarctica have been showing more and more powerful skill in recent years. This paper introduced several NWP models for Antarctica, and summarized the modeling researches of weather and climate over Antarctica, followed by the overview of evaluation and comparison of the NWP models performance.

Key words: review