Workshop on the Antarctic Wind field
The Antarctic is the windiest continent on Earth, 
with many of the coastal research stations 
affected by strong katabatic winds. The strength 
and persistence of the near-surface winds was noted by 
many of the early explorers (Fig. 1), and this feature has 
been perhaps the most intensively studied climatological 
element since then. In recent years there have been 
many advances in our understanding of the wind field 
both through the availability of data from automatic 
weather stations (AWSs) in remote locations and in 
improvements in numerical models. 
For the last four years the Scientific Committee on 
Antarctic Research (SCAR) has been assessing our 
knowledge of the Antarctic wind field and trying to 
improve the representation of the winds in climate 
and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. 
This meeting consisted of invited and submitted 
papers on many aspects of the Antarctic wind field. 
During the final morning there was a panel discussion 
that summarized our current understanding and 
considered the gaps in our knowledge.