Climatological characteristics of arctic and antartic surface-based inversions

In both polar regions, SBIs are more frequent, deeper, and stronger in winter and autumn than in summer and spring. In the Arctic, these tendencies increase from the Norwegian Sea eastward toward the East Siberian Sea, associated both with (seasonal and diurnal) variations in solar elevation angle at the standard radiosonde observation times and with differences between continental and maritime climates. Two state-of-the-art climate models and one reanalysis dataset show similar seasonal patterns and spatial distributions of SBI properties as the radiosonde observations, but with biases in their magnitudes that differ among the models and that are smaller in winter and autumn than in spring and summer.

SBI frequency, depth and intensity are positively correlated, both spatially and temporally, and all three are anti-correlated with surface temperature.