Interior Antarctica is undergoing marked climate change

April 12, 2026

A new paper titled “Interior Antarctica is undergoing marked climate change” has been published in Communications Earth & Environment. The study was co-written by David H. Bromwich (The Ohio State University) and Xun (Jerry) Zou (SIO), with contribution from Sheng-Hung Wang (The Ohio State University).

The study contributes to CW3E’s Strategic Plan (Atmospheric Rivers and Extreme Precipitation Research, Prediction, and Applications) and advances climate understanding in polar regions and AR-driven extremes with implications for future projections.

2024 is the warmest year in NASA’s 145-year climate record. Unlike the Arctic, which has warmed much faster than the global average, temperature changes in Antarctica are highly variable. Using an observational reconstruction, we show that while Antarctica has warmed overall, long-term trends exhibit strong spatial differences and diverge from CMIP6 model simulations. Observations indicate significant warming in the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, with modest cooling in parts of East Antarctica, particularly during austral autumn and winter. In contrast, CMIP6 models overestimate Antarctic warming and amplify it over the interior. Nevertheless, both average and extreme temperature observations suggest that interior Antarctica is undergoing notable climate change, consistent with model projections but at a weaker magnitude. Warming is also evident in the northern Antarctic Peninsula and coastal West Antarctica, while remaining muted along the East Antarctic coast (Fig. 1).

This work represents the final deliverable in a series of studies on Antarctic temperature reconstruction and climate change, highlighting uncertainties in Antarctic climate analysis within reanalysis datasets and global climate models.

Figure 1. Antarctic air temperature trends from station temperature reconstruction (RECON) and CMIP6. Spatial map of annual and seasonal surface air temperature (SAT) trends from 1958 to 2022 based on station temperature reconstruction (RECON; a,c,f,h,e) and CMIP6 multi-model Mean (MMM; b,d,g,i,j). The dot pattern represents trends that are significantly different from zero at P < 0.05 after removing the impact of autocorrelation from the residuals. From Figure 1 in Bromwich et al. (2026).

Citation:

Bromwich, D. H., Zou, X., & Wang, S. H. (2026). Interior Antarctica is undergoing marked climate change. Communications Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03384-4

Additional References:

Bromwich, D. H., Ensign, A., Wang, S.-H., & Zou, X. (2026). Major Artifacts in ERA5 2-m Air Temperature Trends Over Antarctica Prior to and During the Modern Satellite Era. Geophysical Research Letters, 51(21), e2024GL111907. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL111907

Bromwich, D., Wang, S. H., Zou, X., & Ensign, A. (2025). An updated reconstruction of Antarctic near-surface air temperatures at monthly intervals since 1958. Earth System Science Data, 17(6), 2953–2962. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2953-2025