FORECAST ANTARCTICA
The Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System, on one map — the frozen bottom of the world, twice a day
The ice, right now
LOADING…Every staffed station on the continent, with the model's 2 m temperature and wind for the current hour. Click one for its forecast. Drawn on the polar stereographic projection AMPS itself runs on — true to scale at 71°S, the Greenwich meridian up, the Ross Sea at the bottom — over relief drawn here from the elevation itself.
The grids
AMPS · WRF · 00 & 12 UTCThe signposts
NO ROADS · GREAT-CIRCLE KMThere are no highways here, so there are no exit signs — but McMurdo and the Pole both keep a striped post of arrows pointing at everyone's home town. These are ours: the great-circle distance from the ice to the cities the flights and ships leave from.
How to read it
Pick a grid, then a field. AMPS nests seven grids inside one another, from 24 km across the whole Southern Hemisphere down to 900 m over Ross Island. The coarse grids run five days at three-hour steps; the fine ones run hourly for a day and a half. Switching grids holds the valid time, so the same moment stays on screen.
Read a value anywhere. Every frame is a colour-mapped image drawn through a fixed palette — a reversible encoding of the field — so the pointer reads the model's number back out of whichever pixel it is over, and each station label carries its own value.
Know what the plateau does to the numbers. The ice sheet stands three to four kilometres high. Sea-level pressure is a fiction there, so it is left blank above 1500 m, and 500 hPa heights are blank where the ground itself is above 500 hPa. Wind chill is the North American formula, which is what the U.S. and New Zealand programs brief with.
Everything is in UTC, with New Zealand time alongside — McMurdo and the South Pole keep Christchurch's clock. Temperatures default to Celsius and winds to knots, and the toggles above are remembered on every page.