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 revised dataset. The original unmodified dataset can be found here: https://doi.org/10.48567/c3yk-tw55.

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.

The revision mentioned above in the 'Important Note' is described in a Corrigendum published in the January 2014 issue of Nature Geoscience. This corrigendum is accompanied by a Supplementary Information describing in detail what we learned from the newly-discovered 6-hourly temperature observations from 1957-1975, how/why we corrected the original monthly mean temperatures from this period, and what impacts these corrections had on the results presented in the original paper. As we underscore at the end of the corrigendum, '' the main finding of the study, namely that the total annual temperature increase at Byrd between 1958 and 2010 still ranks among the fastest warming rates on Earth, remains valid.''

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.