Increasing Reflectivity of the Antarctic Ocean-Atmosphere System: Analysis of TOMS and Passive Microwave Data for 1979-1994

Measurements of Lambert-equivalent reflectance at 380 nm from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instrument have shown increases in reflectivity between 1979-94 over much of the Southern Ocean, encompassing 160 degrees in longitude. These trends represent a possible change in the state of the Antarctic ocean-atmosphere system related to recent climate warming. To determine if these reflectivity trends are due to changes in cloud cover, sea ice, or both, the TOMS data were collocated with a contemporaneous passive microwave satellite data set from the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I). The passive microwave data sets specify total sea ice concentration, retrieved by a uniform method for all years using the NASA Team Algorithm. To first order, the locations of TOMS reflectivity increases coincide with regions where sea ice concentration has increased over the past two decades, signifying that the TOMS trends are the result of trends in underlying sea ice and not cloud cover. However, when the TOMS reflectivity measurements are sorted into fixed sea ice concentration bins of width 0.1, the TOMS data also show increasing reflectivity trends in regions where sea ice extent has been decreasing (Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas, Western Antarctic Peninsula). Over open water, TOMS reflectivity trends are less convincing and may be artifacts related to uncertainties in passive microwave sea ice identification. These results suggest that a significant component in the Southern Ocean TOMS reflectivity trends may be a gradual increase in the albedo of the underlying sea ice. This could be caused by increases in precipitation over Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, suggested by global climate modeling studies as one manifestation of a climate warming scenario.