Climate of extremes - Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent - page 118

Box 4.4 Observing Antarctic weather and climate:

automatic weather stations

Figure 4.15 Photograph of the Sabrina automatic weather

station on the Ross Ice Shelf. (Credit: Shelley Knuth,
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental
Sciences, University of Colorado)

There are very few year-round stations on the continent so that vast areas of the
continent are unoccupied with nobody to collect weather data. Starting in the early
1980s automatic weather stations measuring temperature, pressure, wind speed and
direction, and humidity have been installed in many remote locations. The weather
stations can operate for years without being visited, although sometimes the harsh
Antarctic climate does damage or destroy these weather stations. The data collected