I am Cécile Agosta, a climate scientist at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Paris-Saclay, France.
The POLARiso project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 841073 from November 2019 to October 2021.
The rate of Antarctic ice loss is accelerating and reached 20% ofthe global sea level rise in 2012–2017. This acceleration is attributed to the coupling between atmosphere, ocean, and ice sheet dynamics. Intensive efforts are in place for modelling this complex coupled system, which is the only valid approach to improve sea level rise projections. The greatest uncertainty in simulating the future of the Antarctic ice sheet is due to the lack of direct observational constraints required to evaluate and improve global climate models. The isotopic signals contained in Antarctic ice cores have high potential to record the climate variability of recent centuries as water stable isotopes are tracers of the whole water cycle pathway. However, linking the isotopic signal to climate patterns requires to use isotope-enabled climate models, which are currently limited by their poor skills in simulating polar-specific processes.
The POLARiso project aims to overcome this major limitation by implementing water stable isotopes in the polar-oriented regional climate model MAR, which will be evaluated with new isotope observations in Antarctica. We will use the validated simulations to identify large scale drivers of the isotope variability at the Antarctic surface. This project is based on a synergy between advances in Antarctic climate modelling (my expertise) and advances in continuous measurements of water isotopes in water vapor and precipitation in Antarctica (GLACCIOS team, LSCE). POLARiso final objective is to provide robust transfer functions between climate modes and water isotope variability, which will open doors for new climate reconstructions based on water isotope measurements in Antarctic ice cores.