Scientific Motivations:
•The polar regions may provide the earliest signal of a climate change because of feedbacks between ice, ocean and atmosphere.
•The Antarctic Peninsula region appears to be anomalously warm climatologically compared to the rest of the continent.
•The entire Antarctic sea ice cover has been observed to be increasing at less than 1%/decade while the Bellingshausen/Amundsen Seas region has been declining at an anomalously large negative rate.
•Correlation of SO indices with B/A ice cover appears to be very strong.