Optimal coring locations for high resolution climate reconstructions from the East Antarctic Plateau

Oxygen isotopes of snow, firn, and ice cores provide valuable information on past climate variations. Yet, multiple processes, such as stratigraphic noise and the advection of spatial isotope variations linked to topographic anomalies create non-climatic variations (‘noise’) in the ice-core record and limit the quality of high-resolution climate reconstructions. All of these processes are site specific and vary depending on the environmental conditions at and around the ice-core location.  In the last years, based on field studies, numerical experiments and theoretical considerations, we improved our quantitative understanding of these noise generating processes and their dependency on the depositional conditions. Building on this work, we here ask the question how the potential quality of ice-core based climate reconstructions depends on the drilling site location.  Making use of digital elevation models,  ice flow-velocity maps and statistical relationships between the surface topography, accumulation anomalies,  isotopic anomalies and stratigraphic noise, we predict the site and time-scale dependent noise contribution to ice-core records of the last millennium. The created maps provide a step towards choosing optimal ice coring and  sampling locations for high-resolution climate reconstructions from Antarctic ice-cores and provide testable predictions for the quality of future ice-core records.