Their greatest strength, though, is in providing the beginning of a climatology of interrelated polar variables. For instance, understanding how albedo changes with surface temperature over sea ice becomes trivial using this data set because the information is in a form conducive to climatological analyses. Numerical models of the planet's general circulation indicate that polar regions are anything but insignificant climatologically. Climate-change projections show polar regions warming faster than lower latitudes. The long-term record indicates that glacial areas have evolved quite differently than tropical climates.
Polar regions respond quickly to changes in climate conditions.
Leads, channels of open water within sea ice, and the open ocean at the fluctuating ice margin, respond to incoming solar energy, inducing moisture fluxes that lead to cloud formation and precipitation which ultimately feed back into global atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Earth's ice and snow shape daily weather and human activities around the world. It's hard to assess, for example, the way clouds behave, or the way clouds and radiation interact in the Arctic. These interactions may be quite different from the way they occur elsewhere. The instruments selected to provide Polar Pathfinder data sets provide different and complementary information, Flato points out.