Abstract
A 14 year integration with a regional atmospheric model has been used to determine the near‐surface climatological wind field over the Antarctic ice sheet at a horizontal grid spacing of 55 km. Previous maps of the near‐surface wind field were generally based on models ignoring the large‐scale pressure‐gradient forcing term in the momentum equation. Presently, state‐of‐the‐art atmospheric models include all pressure‐gradient forcing terms. Evaluation of our model output against in situ data shows that the model is able to represent realistically the observed increase in wind speed going from the interior to the coast, as well as the observed wind direction at South Pole and Dumont d'Urville and the bimodal wind distribution at Halley. Copyright © 2004 Royal Meteorological Society