I recommend visiting the following website for the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center (AMRC) and the Automatic Weather Station (AWS) program of the US Antarctic Program (USAP), for research, analysis and real-time and archived meteorological data. The attached image is an example of a product from satellite data showing typical geopotential heights and wind speed contours around the Antarctic showing how the circumpolar pattern distinguishes the Antarctic from other areas of the world.
https://amrc.ssec.wisc.edu/The website also links to related Antarctic related news such as the following (from redorbit March 12, 2013):
"One would not assume that cloud cover over Antactica’s Southern Ocean could cause rainfall in Zambia or the tropical island of Java. New research from the University of Washington, however, finds that a phantom band of rainfall just south of the equator that does not occur in reality is caused by poor simulation of the cloud cover thousands of miles farther to the south. This illusionary band of rainfall is one of the most persistent biases in global climate models.
Atmospheric scientists at Washington hope that their results will help explain why global climate models duplicate the inter-tropical convergence zone, a band of heavy rainfall in the northern tropics, on the other side of the equator by mistake.
The results of the study appear in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“There have been tons of efforts to get the tropical precipitation right, but they have looked in the tropics only,” said Yen-Ting Hwang, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences who found the culprit in one of the most remote areas of the planet.
“What we found, and that was surprising to us, is the models tend to be not cloudy enough in the Southern Ocean so too much sunlight reaches the ocean surface and it gets too hot there,” Hwang said. “People think of clouds locally, but we found that these changes spread into the lower latitudes.”
Prior studies examined tropical sea-surface temperatures, or better ways to represent tropical winds and clouds. None managed to correctly stimulate rainfall in the tropics, however, which is an important region for global climate models since small shifts in rainfall patterns can have huge effects on climate and agriculture.
“The rain bands are very sharp in this area,” commented Dargan Frierson, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “You go from some of the rainiest places on Earth to some of the driest in [less than a few hundred miles].”
Recent theories have suggested that tropical rainfall might be linked to global processes. The new research looked for possible connections to ocean temperatures, air temperatures, winds and cloud cover.
“For the longest time we were expecting that it would be a combination of different factors,” Frierson said, “but this one just stood out.”
Cloud biases over the Southern Ocean are the primary contributor to the phantom double rain band problem existing in most modern climate models, the research showed.
“It almost correlates perfectly,” Hwang said in a statement. “The models that are doing better in tropical rainfall are the ones that have more cloud cover in the Southern Ocean.”
And the following website announce of new Antarctic meteorological records for the month of March 2013:
New Records for South Pole for March 2013!
Day 9: The peak wind speed of 27 knots/31 mph broke the previous record of 26 knots/30 mph set in 2010.
Day 10: The temperature of -35.8°C/-32.4°F tied the previous maximum temperature record set in 2010.
Day 15: The peak wind speed of 27 knots/31 mph broke the previous record of 25 knots/29 mph set in 2004.