Description: We present a simulation of Antarctic iceberg drift and melting that includes small, medium‐sized, and giant tabular icebergs with a realistic size distribution. For the first time, an iceberg model is initialized with a set of nearly 7000 observed iceberg positions and sizes around Antarctica. The study highlights the necessity to account for larger and giant icebergs in order to obtain accurate melt climatologies. We simulate drift and lateral melt using iceberg‐draft averaged ocean currents, temperature, and salinity. A new basal melting scheme, originally applied in ice shelf melting studies, uses in situ temperature, salinity, and relative velocities at an iceberg's bottom. Climatology estimates of Antarctic iceberg melting based on simulations of small (≤2.2 km), “small‐to‐medium‐sized" (≤10 km), and small‐to‐giant icebergs (including icebergs 〉10 km) exhibit differential characteristics: successive inclusion of larger icebergs leads to a reduced seasonality of the iceberg meltwater flux and a shift of the mass input to the area north of 58°S, while less meltwater is released into the coastal areas. This suggests that estimates of meltwater input solely based on the simulation of small icebergs introduce a systematic meridional bias; they underestimate the northward mass transport and are, thus, closer to the rather crude treatment of iceberg melting as coastal runoff in models without an interactive iceberg model. Future ocean simulations will benefit from the improved meridional distribution of iceberg melt, especially in climate change scenarios where the impact of iceberg melt is likely to increase due to increased calving from the Antarctic ice sheet.

Description: In the early 1980s, Germany started a new era of modern Antarctic research. The Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) was founded and important research platforms such as the German permanent station in Antarctica, today called Neumayer III, and the research icebreaker Polarstern were installed. The research primarily focused on the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. In parallel, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) started a priority program ‘Antarctic Research’ (since 2003 called SPP-1158) to foster and intensify the cooperation between scientists from different German universities and the AWI as well as other institutes involved in polar research. Here, we review the main findings in meteorology and oceanography of the last decade, funded by the priority program. The paper presents field observations and modelling efforts, extending from the stratosphere to the deep ocean. The research spans a large range of temporal and spatial scales, including the interaction of both climate components. In particular, radiative processes, the interaction of the changing ozone layer with large-scale atmospheric circulations, and changes in the sea ice cover are discussed. Climate and weather forecast models provide an insight into the water cycle and the climate change signals associated with synoptic cyclones. Investigations of the atmospheric boundary layer focus on the interaction between atmosphere, sea ice and ocean in the vicinity of polynyas and leads. The chapters dedicated to polar oceanography review the interaction between the ocean and ice shelves with regard to the freshwater input and discuss the changes in water mass characteristics, ventilation and formation rates, crucial for the deepest limb of the global, climate-relevant meridional overturning circulation. They also highlight the associated storage of anthropogenic carbon as well as the cycling of carbon, nutrients and trace metals in the ocean with special emphasis on the Weddell Sea.