Coldest ever temperature recorded on Earth found in Antarctica

I am waiting for this to flash up on the television. I just know they are going to give this the unbiased coverage it deserves. You know, bring on a few skeptic meteorologists, show how there are hot and cold records all the time, that it doesn’t prove anything, but it should draw the alarmists’ view into question. Maybe parents around the world, at least for tonight, can put their kids to bed, telling them AGW isn’t hiding under the bed for them…
I think I will be waiting a while.

Thanks Anthony. Good article.
That’s cold! This global warming is killing us (at least those of us who could be in Antarctica).

Brrrrrrrrrrr!
I can’t even imagine it.

Space is as cold as 2.725 K; which works out to -270.425 C or -454.765 F.
Scambos said. “We will need to investigate electronics that can survive those temperatures.”
NASA sends spacecraft and satellites into temperatures a lot colder than −92 to −94 degrees Celsius (−134 to −137 degrees Fahrenheit) How do they survive?

They could check my ex wife – where the heart is supposed to be located. There really is no explanation for how cold that location is.

Nope, no CO2 there. Unless you count dry ice. It congeals at -109.3°F or -78.5°C!! So they should look for it piling up on that plateau.

As Trenberth and Fasullo said:
“Global warming has not stopped; it is merely manifested in different ways”
So there yah go… the record cold is irrefutable proof of global warming.
Do I have to say it? I guess I should: /sarc
🙂

The BBC have it…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25287806

I think the most pressing issue here is how much this evidence could effect calculating global temperature mean. Moving forward, would GiSS do any reconstructions and/or GCM recalculations?

This story was reported on the BBC breakfast news. I also followed the link provided by DavidS. In both cases there was a total lack of CAGW spin. Is this a first for the BBC?

Patrick says:
December 9, 2013 at 10:28 pm. It’s not Prince Harry’s race. HRH is supporting a team of limbless veterans wounded in our Joint war, sorry, nation-building exercise, in Afghanistan

There was a story out today, before they announced the record that conforms that CO2 transforms from a gas into dry ice at -78.5°C
http://www.weather.com/news/antarctica-sets-cold-record-20131209
However, it won’t be in the Guinness Book of World Records because these were satellite measured, not from thermometers.
http://www.weather.com/news/antarctica-sets-cold-record-20131209

This merely a local weather variation…..

I assume the record is after adjustment and homogenization?
No one uses real data these days.

Hope the prins has his long underwear whit him.
It’s cold out there.
Now i know what it is they put at average 0.6 degrees Celsius a month on top of the average temperature. They need to do this to get global warming. From the year 2000 on they put in total 7.8 degrees Celsius on top of the temperature. In the end it’s snooted out whit the long year average but even then this is absurd.
I was working on a thing to look at what happens if you alter the data so it looks more like reality but for now it wont work because of the messing around whit the data. I can’t simply believe that the average global temperature is 14 degrees. Only chancing the data up cane make it that warm.

Stonyground says:
December 10, 2013 at 12:01 am
In short, YES!

The Australian Antarctic resupply ship Aurora Australis arrived back in Hobart 07 Dec three weeks behind schedule after encountering heavy sea ice into and out of Davis base.
Not a skerrick about this on the ABC but don’t we all deserve to know whether this is the new norm?
http://www.antarctica.gov.au/media/news/2013/aurora-australis-back-home-after-delay-in-icy-seas

A database has been established for MODIS thermal band radiance values from accurate atmospheric transfer simulations for a wide range of atmospheric and surface conditions. Based on this simulated database, a look-up table and interpolation scheme has been developed for comprehensive studies of the effects of surface temperature and emissivity, atmospheric water vapor, and temperature profiles on MODIS TIR band radiance, and for the development and error analysis of LST algorithms for different land surface situations, with the goal of 1°K LST accuracy.
Existing spectral emissivity measurement data of terrestrial materials show that the band average emissivities in MODIS bands 31 and 32 are relatively stable and known within approximately 0.01 for some land cover types including dense evergreen canopies, lake surface, snow, and most soils.

http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/atbd/atbd_mod11.pdf
In case people were curious if the scientist mentioned in the RT story has any credibility, no they apparently do not. Arguing that a luminance temperature measurement made under what are effectively ideal conditions for said measurements (no solar reflection to deal with, minimal water vapor, zero cloud cover) are less trustworthy than virtually any type of ground based measurements is ridiculous.
Oh, and as has been pointed out several times by myself and others, the freezing point of pure CO2 at 1,000 millibars is a lot higher than the freezing point of barely any CO2 at ~700 millibars.

The presence of so called greenhouse gasses will help COOL the atmosphere. This plateau is over 2000m high so will be around 19C cooler than the sea level temperature due to the DALR. Whatever, it is COLD and remember this is during the Antarctic SUMMER so it could get colder in winter.

Considering how cold these temperatures are recorded on “Domes” of ice piled more than 4 kms high containing ice that may be more than 1 million years old near the bottom of the dome …
… there is probably little ice melt going on here.

1. The record happened in August 2010, Antarctic winter, not summer, johnmarshall.
2. The ppm of CO2 in the hollows isn’t going to change enough that I would even hazard trying to work it out, gases just don’t work that way, Samuel C Cogar.
3. The data has been collected and archived no doubt, and it was during a more recent examination that these lows were found in the records, including the new data from the sat launched recently apparently, J Philip Peterson.
Sometimes there isn’t anyone interested enough to sit and sift through data for stuff like this, or no one free, or funding isn’t available, or any number of other reasons why it is good to have stuff archived and available, even if it isn’t immediately put to use. These satellites produce a HUGE volume of data as they map the entire surface of the planet every couple of days.

Searching for new data is what keeps science going. It is good to see that not all science related to Climate has stagnated due to the team spiking data they do not like.

John M says:
December 10, 2013 at 5:14 am
In addition:
And just because it is below 100°C (or 212°F), that doesn’t mean that all water in the atmosphere is condensed out as rain…

These temps are so incredible that you would think the msm would mention it as … well interesting news.
No mention of the snow storms and low temps in the US either.

Gosh, if this isn’t a sign that the man-climate ‘pocalypse is upon us, I don’t know what is!

“Just because one spot on Earth has set records for cold that has little to do with global warming because it is one spot in one place, said Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and NASA’s former chief scientist. Both Abdalati, who wasn’t part of the measurement team, and Scambos said this is likely an unusual random reading in a place that hasn’t been measured much before and could have been colder or hotter in the past and we wouldn’t know.”
But it is OK to draw warming conclusions from the Arctic using that analysis…./sarc

steverichards1984 says:
December 10, 2013 at 5:52 am
I find it interesting that they said “most of the automated weather stations in the vicinity do not work properly in the dead of winter.”
The problem is the batteries: no battery works below -50°C and heating costs a lot of energy. Solar cells don’t give help during 6 months of darkness and wind energy only helps when there is wind, which in general is not the case for the coldest periods.
How have we measured temperatures at the poles prior to satellite data availability, and what effect could this have on global averages if included?
There are a few stations which are manned year round, which can keep their equipment inside the buildings with the probe outside. I don’t know if these data were/are included in global averages.

@A.D.Everard said: “That is COLD. They won’t be popular, looking for cold areas when climate-fretfuls are searching for the missing heat. Good on ‘em.”
The upside for the warmists is they can measure it next year. If it’s -115, they can do press releases announcing an unprecedented heat wave in Antarctica.

Maybe the geo-engineering kooks can set up a CO2 “snow” ski resort at the highest elevation in central Antarctica. The snow-machines would use CO2 cylinders instead of water.

… you have to be extremely careful not to freeze part of your throat or lungs when inhaling.
I’m guessing that writing your name in the snow is probably out then.

As others have already pointed out it is the partial pressure of carbon dioxide that matters in the phase diagram and not the total air pressure. This is a repeat of a discussion from a few years ago. I find that problems such as this are useful indicators as to whether one truly accepts the atomic (statistical) nature of matter, gasses in particular. If you do not, you think that it is reasonable for the air molecules to coordinate their individual motions so as to knock back any solid carbon dioxide molecule in order to prevent it from subliming (Maxwell’s Demon). If you do, you realize that sublimation and condensation are ongoing processes that have to balance on the phase equilibrium line to give a lasting amount of solid. If there is not enough vapor phase to get there the solid disappears, or does not form to begin with.

ferdberple says:
December 10, 2013 at 7:30 am
yet, almost all the warming is at the north pole. an area where there are few thermometers and poor satellite coverage. even though we now find out there is high resolution data covering 30 years.
so how, if the warming is mostly at one spot – the Arctic – how can this have much to do with global warming? Doesn’t the fact that most of the warming is only in one place, at one of the poles, doesn’t this argue strongly that this cannot be the result of well mixed CO2?
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Arctic warming has to do with warmer oceans which mean a greater volume of the Gulf Stream circulates into the Arctic Ocean. Thus your lower summer’s end sea ice extent. But now a new equilibrium obtains and the ice minimum will fluctuate as it has the last 4-5 years. There will be no “death spiral”.
By the way, CO2 cannot warm the ocean. Sea surface temperature is determined solely by insolation; the greenhouse effect has no effect on SST. So much for AGW.

It’s been so cold that the dog had to be chiseled off the lamp post.

Several comments. Space is not at “3 K”. Space has no temperature, it is a vacuum. Its RADIATIVE temperature is 3 K, which means that anything unheated that is warmer than this will radiate energy away until it reaches equilibrium with this temperature.
On the other hand, vacuum itself is an “insulator” in the sense that it completely blocks three out of four heat transfer mechanisms: conduction, convection and (assuming a sealed satellite) latent heat — it loses heat ONLY through radiation. Exposed to night sky at a vacuum far from any star, objects cool towards 3 K but they cool more and more slowly the colder they get and it can take a very long time for a large object with a small surface to volume ration to cool. Brown dwarf stars, for example, have no mechanism for producing heat (other than very slow gravitational collapse, perhaps) but will still be “hot” tens of billions of years from now, long after our sun will have burned out and exploded.
Satellites can be kept warm quite easily, as they are exposed to direct sunlight which (close to the Earth) has a radiance of ~1400 W/m^2. This is large enough that the problem can easily be not heating up too much in direct sunlight, as the cooling rate from the shadow side of a satellite will be much smaller than the heating rate. However, both sunlight and LWIR are easily reflected from shiny metal foil. Hence the invention of “space blankets” — metal coated mylar. Interpose one between the satellite and the sun and it blocks (most of) the heat gain, reflecting the energy without itself heating up much. Interpose one between the satellite and the rest of space and it blocks (most of) the heat loss by reflecting outgoing LWIR back to the satellite. Mount the reflectors on movable shrouds, and you can regulate the temperature of the satellite to stay cool in direct sun or retain heat when one is e.g. in the Earth’s shadow or on a foray through the solar system that takes it first close to the sun and then out into the outer darkness. Up close to the sun, one may even need “radiator” panels — panels shielded from the sun and designed (high surface to volume ratio) to efficiently radiate heat away, perhaps from a compressed fluid as part of an active refrigeration cycle.
As long as such a satellite is sufficiently close to the sun, solar panels can perform the dual function of providing electrical energy and blocking/reflecting sunlight from the satellite body proper, and one may even need a shielded radiator as noted to keep the satellite cool. Out among the outer planets, where sunlight is weak and nothing changes fast, a satellite needs an internal power supply and needs to conserve the heat it produces. IIRC, satellites destined for the long dark often carry radioisotope (thermal) generators that have very long lifetimes. Basically, things like Plutonium Oxide are mixed up at a subcritical size that produces enough heat from alpha decay that it actually glows a dull red, then surrounded by a solid state thermocouple that directly generates electricity as the heat flows from this heat source to actively cooled surrounding coolant gas. The satellite conserves as much of the waste heat as it needs to to keep the electronics (which also release heat on their own in operation) happy and radiates the rest away.
Second — regarding the “pegging” of the temperatures close to -100 C — it is worth noting that the sublimation temperature of CO_2 at 1 atmosphere is considerably warmer than this — around -79 C. Up on the plateau the air pressure will be something less than 1 atm (although I didn’t see what it is in the article above) and so the gas-solid coexistence temperature is likely to be very close to the observed temperature. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the cause of the consistent “clipping” of the temperature is that CO_2 is misting out of the atmosphere at that temperature in these pockets, accumulating as CO_2 “snow” that further accretes CO_2 frost on the surfaces. There is an infinite supply of CO_2 (replenished rapidly by diffusion) and so latent heat clips the temperature unless/until the atmosphere is completely stripped of CO_2 (which never happens).
This could easily be tested, of course. Simply grab a sample of the surrounding surface snow after the temperature has held steady at the CO_2 freezing point for a week or two and measure its CO_2 concentration when it melts.
It is at least plausible that this process “clips” the Earth’s low temperature during glacial eras, and is one of the processes responsible for the dip of atmospheric CO_2 to near the extinction levels of at least some plants during the Wisconsin. It could also easily be a major factor in the rapid warm up during the initial stages of interglacials — as soon as high arctic and antarctic reservoirs warm up enough to fail to re-freeze CO_2 in the long winter night, the active GHE could easily provide rapid positive feedback and reduce the CO_2 deposition zones, releasing massive amounts of CO_2 to the atmosphere extremely rapidly (but not until well after the warming was underway elsewhere, as this is likely to be relevant only inside the arctic circle or VERY high up — Greenland, Antarctica, and perhaps parts of Alaska and Siberia).
Of course, this opens up a lot of questions. The upper troposphere is around -80C, which would be cold enough to deposit CO_2 if it were at 1 atm, but is safely too warm at a couple tenths of a bar over most of the Earth. However, if the polar circulations alter and trap cold, inverted air over deposition cells such as the ones below, the troposphere can further cool, extending the depth of the deposition layer and conceivably actually starting to deplete the atmosphere of CO_2 locally. Note that it doesn’t even have to fall to the surface — all the CO_2 has to do is start to clump — stick together when one CO_2 molecule collides with another — and even microscopic flecks of solid CO_2 so small that they never have time to fall out are removed from the GHG equation as the clumps no longer have the same spectrum as isolated CO_2 molecules. Polar cooling could well be nonlinear once atmospheric temperatures reach the deposition point, at which point the atmosphere becomes unstable if it is not well-mixed.
Ordinarily, of course, it is quite stable. The tropopause is where the atmosphere inverts, with a warmer stratosphere over a coolest tropopause atop a DALR from the surface. But when the surface itself becomes very cold, instabilities can easily form and this is one of them that is at least plausible, although before I believed too much in my own prose I’d want to see a measurement of increased CO_2 deposition in the surface snow of the cold zones and/or direct measurements of atmospheric deposition in the air immediately above them. But this too could be a contributor to the relatively rapid END of interglacials. If periods of deposition are interspersed with periods of heavy snowfall, concentrated CO_2 could get systematically locked up in increasing glacial ice even if it re-sublimates as the falling snow warms it back up above the deposition point.
rgb

It can not be the levels in itself that sets the limit. It can only be the combination of the gasses and that they are as cold as the surface.
“The levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, traces of water vapor and other gases in the air may impose a more or less uniform limit on how much heat can radiate from the surface,” Scambos said.
He should know the connection, so how can it be that he does not spell it out correctly.

I initially thought the same thing but I don’t think this helps. The troposphere is non-existent at this location. Hence, the atmosphere above the surface is really the stratosphere. And, AGW predicts cooling of the stratosphere.
This is vastly oversimplified. It is true that the atmosphere is often inverted over peak surface cold, so that the atmosphere is warmer above the ground than the ground is, but that isn’t quite the same thing as saying that there is no troposphere, and it certainly has nothing to do with AGW predictions of cooling of the “stratosphere” if you choose to call the inverted troposphere the stratosphere.
The question of cooling arises when the troposphere, that is effectively opaque to in-band LWIR from ground level up to within a km or so of the tropopause, becomes transparent to in-band LWIR as the absolute density of GHG molecules falls below the levels required to keep the mean free path of upward-directed LWIR photons smaller than the distance to infinity. Near the ground the mean free path is order meters and in-band photons “diffuse” around in the gas, directed down (back to Earth) almost as often as they are directed up, ascending in a random walk of increasing stride as they go up to where the GHGs are less dense.
In the actual stratosphere, most upward-directed LWIR photons escape. Oxygen and Nitrogen don’t have much bandwidth in the relevant blackbody regime, so they do not contribute much to radiative cooling, but (especially) CO_2 and Ozone and water vapor do and as they are heated by collisions with O_2 and N_2 (cooling the O_2 and N_2 in the process) they radiate away a lot of the heat. Hence cooling.
In the lower atmosphere — whatever you want to name it — this does not happen. Sure, O_2 and N_2 collide with CO_2 near the surface, but the LWIR the CO_2 radiates away has an even chance of being returned to the surface and has to diffuse all the way to the tropopause before it has a good chance of being radiated away from the Earth. The plain old GHE still works, in other words, as long as the mean free path of the relevant in-band photons is smaller than the optical depth of the atmosphere overhead.
rgb

No, I think the coldest temperature ever recorded on the planet is IN MY CLASSROOM RIGHT THIS MINUTE.
Or at least it seems like it…
I posted a link to this story on the book of faces last night and oh, my…it was not appreciated very much by a certain subset of those on my list of friends. They just do not want to hear about this, or the recovery of ice in the north, or cold temps anywhere at all, actually.
It tastes sweet to me, though.

Last week, while Alberta was struggling with lows in the -30C’s, some dimwit started spreading the rumor that Alberta currently had the lowest temperatures on the planet. I seriously wonder what planet these people live on. It was laughably easy to find many places far colder than we were.
And STILL some refused to believe it.

rgbatduke, it really is just the partial pressure that matters. Water will condense or frost out as long as the partial pressure in the diluent gas is greater than the vapor pressure of the liquid or solid phase. At the interface there will be a continuous exchange of molecules as some sublime, others frost out.
With CO2, the same equilibrium statistics will apply. If you had a bag full of pure CO2, yes it would freeze- but the same CO2 diluted to 400 ppm will not produce any frost. The partial pressure of CO2 is not high enough to allow frost to form, just as air with partial pressure of water below the vapor pressure will not form frost.
To put numbers on it:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=vapor+pressure+of+co2+at+136K
Vapor pressure of CO at 136K: 931uBar
On the Antarctic plateau at ~2km altitude, the atmospheric pressure is about 0.8 Bar, so
Partial pressure of CO2: 800,000 uBar x 400e-6 = 320 uBar
So even at 136K. air is very “dry” with respect to CO2 and no condensation can occur.

In reality they are setting up new thermometers in that plateau so they can claim warming next year and get the $$$.

So even at 136K. air is very “dry” with respect to CO2 and no condensation can occur.
Well, maybe, for pure CO_2 with little to no other gas present, such as in the atmosphere of mars (where dry ice snowfall has recently been observed at just 14x the partial pressure of CO_2 on Earth) and where the adiabatic heating produced by the phase transition limits the temperature drop precisely they way I suggest might happen above in Antarctica. But just as aerosols modulate the critical dynamics of nucleation and growth of water droplets, so might they modulate the critical dynamics of nucleation and growth of CO_2 microcrystals.
Note well I’m not talking about the falling out of huge amounts of CO_2 snow. I’m talking about the possibility that — just as frost lines forms preferentially and at partial pressures too low to actually support “snow” on defects (e.g. scratches) in a cold surface because the local electrochemistry causes surface adsorption potentials to be lowered enough to permit nucleation and limited growth — it may be that snow and ice crystals themselves produce a similarly favorable “defect rich” environment that can collect CO_2 deposition in air where direct deposition is unstable. It would certainly explain the apparently “fixed” lowest temperature, but hey, the observations so far are nearly anecdotal in scope and it may be that in five years they’ll observe a much broader range of lowest temperatures.
I’ve done a fair amount of work simulating critical phenomena, and the big questions are what is the size distribution function and mean lifetime of microparticle condensates that are ALWAYS forming and breaking up in a gas, as functions of the temperature and partial pressure and composition of any background gas, not whether or not one has reached a macroscopic critical point or a critical size where droplet growth is favored over decay (as is the relevant case for water droplet condensation into clouds). The presence of bare ions of any sort in the atmosphere is enough to shift the distributions significantly for polar water — I have no good feel for what non-polar CO_2 will do. However, I think it is safe to say that the critical temperature you suggest above is a lower bound, and probably doesn’t take into account any sort of heterogeneous surface chemistry that might favor deposition. Note well that there has been a recent paper suggesting that we sequester solid CO_2 in the Antarctic because a block of solid CO_2 has a very, very long lifetime at -90 C and 1 atmosphere — that was the entire point of their argument.
Either way, I certainly won’t argue — perhaps the hypothesis is implausible and there is some other reason the temperatures are clipping or none at all (because the clipping is an anecdotal accident, not a real effect). It would still be so easy to check experimentally, though. Well, easy if you allow for the fact that one has to travel a long ways and work in extremely dangerous conditions to take the samples in the first place…;-)
But for all that, it is a lot simpler than travelling to Mars. And wouldn’t it be cool if we could observe spontaneous CO_2 deposition on Earth, catalyzed by surface chemistry or aerosol chemistry to be sure, but even so it would have a potentially large impact on our perceptions of things like the Ordovician-Silurian transition, when an ice age occurred with Mars-like CO_2 partial pressures in the Earth’s atmosphere.
rgb

rgb,
I understand what you are getting at now and agree that it is possible and maybe even plausible. This would involve very small amounts, maybe even a chemisorbed mono layer, but then there is a lot of surface area on snow. I have done work on adsorption of water vapour on various surfaces and changes in latent heat are seen as additional layers are adsorbed. However usually the relative and not absolute humidity is the important variable. More research is needed. 🙂
wms

Brian, Willis, everyone who has been discussing CO2 condensation/solidification at such a low partial pressure. . . . interesting discussion and thoughts. Made me do a lot of thinking. . . and my mind went in a wierd direction.
Ozone solidifies at only 10 degrees lower! Since no one has been actually measuring the surface temp over the years, and since ultra low temps would create a self perpetuating sink if auto-solidification plus radiation to space of the latent heat loss occurred . . . could this be an alternative explanation for the fluctuating “ozone” hole over the continent? Could we also actually have a “CO2” hole?
This location and these unique conditions just beg for detailed atmospheric gas concentration measurements on the ground! You don’t have to release weather balloons you just have to extend a jar on a long pole out of your igloo with your 14 layer gloves on, wait a little while, remotely cap the jar, then haul it back in and sample what you “captured” with a good Mass Spec in a vacuum chamber!
And Paul Westhaver, that is where my thoughts went next. What an ideal location for an air liquifaction plant. Raw material is most of the way already there! Course the energy to ship the final product to customers would most likely make it a non-starter, but at the very least, this site is ideal for “ultra” cold research.

Oh, a simple explanation for the temperature floor effect?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/polar/gif_files/time_p_t90s.png
The stratosphere even at the poles rarely drops below 178K (~-95 Celsius), so getting temperatures below the tropopause to drop further would seem to be thermodynamically unfavorable, as most of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere should now be capable of losing energy to the surface, wouldn’t it?

Come on all you scientists, don’t volcanoes have an effect on global temps too. And there are a few in Antarctica. Terrestrial and sub marine.

So the smaller the volume of a dry ice flake, the faster it will sublime, and the slower it will accumulate new CO2 from the atmosphere. So in theory, there is a maximum size that a dry ice blob can grow to at some Temperature below the triple point. I’m guessing that the size is likely too small to be visible.
And I would completely agree. Too small to be visible is not too small to have an impact on air temperatures or on the net GHE, and the size is almost certainly variable with ionic nucleation sites. In fact, I found a recent dissertation on adsorption and desorption of interstellar ices on dust grain analogue surfaces. The physics is not simple. Bear in mind that -93 C is 180 K — that’s pretty cold.
So now we can pump all the CO2 to Dome A and form dry ice naturally and just stack it up like firewood. 🙂
You laugh, but this is a no-shit-sherlock proposal that was recently examined in a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Solar powered CO_2 precipitators in the antarctic that would deposit solid CO_2 and move it deep into the glacial ice where it would presumably sit for a long, long time, safely sequestered. I didn’t read the paper as I’ve already got several unread science fiction novels on my tablet to go through first.
rgb

Are you telling me that said denser air at the surface does not contain a greater number of CO2 molecules per unit volume ….. and which is subject to being “trapped” by either fresh snowfall or blowing snow …. and subsequently being “counted” by ice core researchers …. thus resulting in a highly inflated atmospheric CO2 ppm estimate?
And I was wondering, how does one know if the “layer of ice” …. in the ice core ….. was the result of a snowfall(s) or the result of wind-blown snow? ~Samuel C Cogar

The air pressure at that altitude is around 600~700 millibars anyways, and gases diffuse so any instantaneous increase in concentration represents a decrease elsewhere, so it is unlikely to be anything more than a brief fluctuation.
Additionally the CO2 and other gases trapped in ice cores are generally able to mix with the atmosphere freely until the snow is compressed to a certain point and traps bubbles.
Wind blown snow will probably be lighter, while the layers compacted into ice are generally from the year before and had some melting occur on top, letting water filter down inside and glue the snow together more effectively until sufficient accumulation compresses it into ice.
____________
On a lark I decided to work out what latitudes would get solar heating in the stratosphere even in winter.
Go go gadget trig! Take the polar radius to be ~6350 km, then a 90 degree tangent from the arctic circle intersects a cone from the center of the planet with sides ~6400 km long around 75 Degrees South.
Everywhere further north than there can receive stratospheric heating during the local winter, locations further south are unlikely to get direct solar heating in the stratosphere outside of spring/summer/fall.
The domes and ridges in the story are around 77~79 S, hence the regular plunge in stratosphere temperatures, and I find it unlikely to be coincidental that the stratosphere and these surface cold traps both drop to almost the same temperature before bottoming out.

The coldest place on earth is not quite cold enough to solidify CO2. But this discussion leads me to wonder whether solid CO2 is likely a part of the Snowball Earth geography. This potential CO2 phase transition during ice ages can answer some puzzles about paleoatmospheres.
See WUWT Oct 6, ‘2013 We Must Get Rid of the Carboniferous Warm Period
Willis’ chart makes clear how the partial pressure of CO2 affects the temperature of sublimation. Could the glaciation of the Proterozoic and Ordovician have had conditions where a CO2 rich atmosphere (partial pressures of 0.1 to 2.0 atmospheres) could lean out precipitating dry-ice onto the thick ice caps? (rgbatduke at 2:11 pm also mentions the Ordovician-Silurian transition in the context of possible CO2 deposition and sublimation).
I can imagine that once the dry ice sublimes, a positive feedback can occur by raising the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and raising temperature to compensate for the raising of the sublimation temperature at higher partial pressures. So the Silurian and Carboniferous could have had thick atmospheres, rich in CO2. Perhaps CO2 was sublimating at the poles while plant life was burying carbon into the massive coal beds of the Carboniferous age.
The source for all that carbon in Carboniferous coal has been a puzzle for me. The gigantism of flora and fauna in the Carboniferous and Mesozoic, particularly with respect to large fliers, leads me to challenge the assumption of near-constant atmospheric pressure. A big problem is once the atmosphere is at 1 to 2 atm in the Cambrian, how can you reach 5 atm in the later Paleozoic? Is a dry-ice reservoir on the polar ice caps a potential way of parking a large CO2 source?
The counter argument is that it would have to exist (at least on and off) almost half a billion years between Snowball (or earlier) and the Carboniferous and maybe the late Mesozoic. More CO2 would have to freeze out during the polar winters than could sublime in the summers. Latent heat budgets coupled with IR radiation and emissivity of dry ice might hold some surprises.

Max™ says:
December 11, 2013 at 11:24 am
“The air pressure at that altitude is around 600~700 millibars anyways, and gases diffuse so any instantaneous increase in concentration represents a decrease elsewhere, so it is unlikely to be anything more than a brief fluctuation.
Additionally the CO2 and other gases trapped in ice cores are generally able to mix with the atmosphere freely until the snow is compressed to a certain point and traps bubbles.
Wind blown snow will probably be lighter, while the layers compacted into ice are generally from the year before and had some melting occur on top, letting water filter down inside and glue the snow together more effectively until sufficient accumulation compresses it into ice.”
————-
Your obfuscations simply amaze me.
And it is obvious to me that you have never traveled or lived in “snow country” and thus have never experienced the “effects” of wind-blown snow, …… specifically in relation to its potential for creating “drifts” and/or accumulating mass quantities in surface depressions. .

“…. freshly wind blown snow hasn’t been compacted for a year like the layers which remain after a prior melt season, water filtering down into the lower layers and freezing is indeed ….”
And just what is the temperature of the snowpack that resides on the surface of glaciers in Antarctica?
Is it >1C or 33F?

Max™ , it matters little whether you have trapped air bubbles or meltwater ….. because the meltwater will absorb the CO2 from the air bubble thus creating carbonic acid.
Every raindrop that fall to the earth’s surface contains carbonic acid.

Just been reading up on methanogenic archaea, active from +10°C to – 15°C. My shaky faith in ice core bubble analysis just got futher shook. That’s a wide transition band for CO2 and H2O to get morphed into CH4. Snowing and icing are far from the passive processes postulated by Climate Fabulists.