Reconstructed Byrd temperature record, 1957 - 2012.

IMPORTANT NOTE (2013/09/06): The 1957-1979 portion of this dataset was revised in September 2013 following our discovery of previously unused detailed observations from Byrd Station on the website of the National Climatic Data Center. This record comprises the original dataset. The ongoing revised dataset can be found here: https://amrdcdata.ssec.wisc.edu/dataset/reconstructed-byrd-temperature-record-1957-present.

This dataset provides the near-surface temperature dataset from Byrd Station, in central West Antarctica, used by Bromwich et al. in the 2013 Nature Geoscience article entitled Central West Antarctica among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth. A detailed description of the methods used to fill in the gaps in the temperature record can be found in the Methods section of the paper and in its Supplementary Information. The citation for this paper is:

Bromwich, D., Nicolas, J., Monaghan, A., Lazzara, M., Keller, L., Weidner, G., and Wilson, A., 2013: Central West Antarctica among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth. Nature Geoscience 6, 139–145, https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1671.

For months with available temperature observations from Byrd, the monthly mean temperature values are calculated from 6-hourly observations and—to a lesser extent and only for the 1957-1975—from daily minimum/maximum temperatures.

The sources of the observations are as follows:

• For 1957-1975, the 6-hourly data are taken from the Integrated Surface Hourly Data set (DS 3505), and the daily minima/maxima are taken from the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Data Set (GHCN-Daily).

• From 1980 onward (the Byrd AWS era), the observations are originally from the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, responsible for running the Antarctic AWS Program. For our dataset, we use the monthly mean temperatures computed by the Antarctic READER project from the observations provided by the AMRC.