Antarctic cold spells shatter records amid global heat waves in late winter 2023
by Chinese Academy of Sciences
The United States Antarctic Program fuel cache in the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf, located off the South Pole Traverse Road that connects McMurdo Station to South Pole Station. Credit:19 Dec 2023, David Mikolajczyk.
While 2023 is noted for breaking global temperature records (State of the Global Climate 2023), the year also brought an unexpected twist with extreme cold events in Antarctica. A new study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences reveals the surprising and severe cold spells that struck the continent in late winter (July and August).
In a detailed examination of the late winter months of 2023, researchers observed extreme cold temperatures across a broad region of Antarctica.
"Record cold temperatures were observed in our Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) network as well as other locations around the region," said Matthew A. Lazzara of the Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison).
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-antarctic-cold-shatter-global-late.html#google_vignette