The impact of the Madden-Julian oscillation trend on the Antarctic warming during the 1979–2008 austral winter

Antarctica is one of the regions where the earth’s surface is warming most rapidly. The interdecadal warming trend over much of Antarctica during the austral winter is about 1 ◦C decade−1, which is almost twice that of the global mean. There is increasing observational and modeling evidence that high-latitude warming is linked to localized heating in the tropics. Here we show that interdecadal changes in the spatial patterns of the extratropical response to various phases of the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) explain 10–20% of the interdecadal warming over Antarctica, possibly through the poleward propagation of tropically forced Rossby wave trains. Copyright  2012 Royal Meteorological Society