Record warming at the South Pole during the past three decades

Clem, Kyle R.; Fogt, Ryan L.; Turner, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6111-5122; Lintner, Benjamin R.; Marshall, Gareth J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8887-7314; Miller, James R.; Renwick, James A.. 2020 Record warming at the South Pole during the past three decades. Nature Climate Change, 10. 762-770. 10.1038/s41558-020-0815-z

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Abstract/Summary

Over the last three decades, the South Pole has experienced a record-high statistically significant warming of 0.61 ± 0.34 °C per decade, more than three times the global average. Here, we use an ensemble of climate model experiments to show this recent warming lies within the upper bounds of the simulated range of natural variability. The warming resulted from a strong cyclonic anomaly in the Weddell Sea caused by increasing sea surface temperatures in the western tropical Pacific. This circulation, coupled with a positive polarity of the Southern Annular Mode, advected warm and moist air from the South Atlantic into the Antarctic interior. These results underscore the intimate linkage of interior Antarctic climate to tropical variability. Further, this study shows that atmospheric internal variability can induce extreme regional climate change over the Antarctic interior, which has masked any anthropogenic warming signal there during the twenty-first century.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	10.1038/s41558-020-0815-z
ISSN:	1758-678X
Additional Keywords:	Atmospheric dynamics, Attribution, Climate and Earth system modelling, Cryospheric science
Related URLs:	Other
Date made live:	06 Jul 2020 13:55 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/528094

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