In response to the need for improved weather prediction capabilities in support of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s Antarctic field operations, the Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System (AMPS) was implemented in October 2000. AMPS employs the Polar MM5, a version of the Pennsylvania State University / National Center for Atmospheric Research Fifth Generation Mesoscale Model optimized for use over ice sheets by the Polar Meteorology Group of the Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center. AMPS is a collaborative effort between The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology group and the Polar Meteorology Group.

AMPS consists of several domains ranging in horizontal resolution from 90 km covering a large part of the Southern Hemisphere, to 3.3 km over the complex terrain surrounding McMurdo Station. Several published studies have shown the model performs with good skill on hourly to seasonal timescales. On seasonal timescales the intraseasonal and interseasonal variability in pressure, temperature, wind, and moisture are well-resolved.

In addition to the real-time applications of AMPS, a continually evolving database of archived forecasts yields high-resolution climatological data that are useful to a broader Antarctic research community. For example, temperatures, 3-dimensional winds, and several moisture proxies are available for about 30 levels in the atmosphere from twice-daily forecasts at 3-hourly temporal resolution on a 30-km grid covering the entire continent. Precipitation, cloud fraction, and complete energy flux fields are also available. These forecasts can be integrated to compute time-mean fields on monthly, seasonal, and annual timescales. Soon the AMPS archive will be available to the Antarctic research community via an Internet database.