Plateau Weather: A Synoptic Study of IAGO and ANARE Observations in East Antarctica,

Automatic weather stations AWS have been operated for a number of years by U.S. and French scientists cooperating in Project Interactions Atmosphere, Glace, Ocean IAGO and by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions ANARE. Six of these stations are sufficiently close to one another on the East Antarctic Plateau for a synoptic interpretation of their observations. The data for 1987 have been reduced to a common format in order to identify episodes of regionally coherent changes. One of these episodes is described and used to outline steps that will be needed for clarifying the relative importance of the local energy balance and the large-scale circulation for the onset, duration, and cessation of katabatic winds on the plateau.