The project will create a long-term (1999-today) time series of the Antarctic perennial sea ice area and potentially other ice types. New remote sensing methods will be developed to achieve this goal and to monitor sea ice type changes over time. By this environmental change can detected and quantified.

The new time series will allow to better understand the role of sea ice as part of the Antarctic and global climate system. The seasonal and long-term variability of the Antarctic perennial sea ice will be analysed in connection with atmospheric forcing obtained from reanalysis and by inter-comparison studies to the Arctic.

The project partners are the University of Bremen, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), University of Hamburg, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), and Chalmers University of Technology.

SITAnt is supported by the Priority Programme 1158 "Antarctic Research with Comparable Investigations in Arctic Sea Ice Areas" funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): DFG GEPRIS project website.