This proposed work is the continued operation of the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center (AMRC) for three years through 2009. AMRC is a meteorological data acquisition and management system with nodes at McMurdo Station and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The system is a resource and archive for meteorological research and a test bed for improving operational synoptic forecasting. Its basis is a computer-based system for organizing, manipulating, and integrating antarctic environmental data, developed by the University of Wisconsin. It captures the flow of meteorological information from polar orbiting satellites, automatic weather stations, operational station synoptic observations, and research project data, producing a mosaic of antarctic satellite images on an operational basis. It also receives environmental data products, such as weather forecasts, from outside Antarctica, and acts as a repository for existing archived databases. The AMRC provides customized weather and climate information for a variety of antarctic users, including aircraft and ship operations of the US Antarctic Program. Currently the AMRC produces the Antarctic Composite Infrared Image, a mosaic of images from four geostationary and three polar-orbiting satellites, which is used for both forecasting and research purposes. In the current time period, AMRC will develop a data exploration/classification toolkit based on self-organizing maps to produce a new, satellite-based antarctic cloud climatology for regions. The AMRC will also be at the center of the evolving Antarctic-Internet Data Distribution (Antarctic-IDD) system, a reliable and formalized means of sharing and distributing Antarctic data among operational and research users. ***
