Monthly mean surface temperature data and derived statistics for some Antarctic stations

This website will eventually encompass all Antarctic stations with surface temperature records that are near-complete, are of reasonable length and for which data can be updated in reasonable time. Links to the pages of the individual stations are on the left.

Note that data prior to 2001 on these pages is primarily based on READER (REference Antarctic Data for Environmental Research) data. The READER project aims to produce a set of definitive monthly mean values of basic meteorological parameters at Antarctic stations up to and including 2000. The project's website contains information about READER together with the datasets themselves.

Link to the READER website


Link to 1971-2000 plots of Antarctic temperature and mean sea level / surface pressure derived from the READER dataset.


The station data available at this site will continue to be updated on a monthly basis or as data become available.

An acknowledgement would be nice if any maps/figures from this site are used in a presentation ... no names mentioned ...


Maps showing near-surface temperature trends around Antarctica

Last updated on January 26th 2012

The trends ilustrated in the maps are computed using a standard least-squares method.

The methodology used to calculate the significance levels is based upon:

Santer B.D., T.M.L. Wigley, J.S. Boyle, D. J. Gaffen, J.J. Hnilo, D. Nychka, D.E. Parker and K.E. Taylor. 2000: Statistical significance of trends and trend differences in layer-average temperature time series. Journal of Geophysical Research, 105, 7337-7356.

Briefly, an effective sample size is calculated based on the lag-1 autocorrelation coefficient of the regression residuals, This effective sample size is used for the computation of the standard error and in indexing the critical values of the Student''s t distribution.

The significance level of the trend is given if it is less than 10%, 5% or 1%.

Annual and seasonal temperature trends around Antarctica for 1951-2011 (colour).


Annual and seasonal temperature trends around Antarctica for 1951-2011 (black & white).


The maps are in PDF format: Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from here


This web page was written to look good in MS Explorer 5.0+ using character entity references from HTML 4.0. Apologies if it doesn't quite work for you. Comments should be addressed to Dr Gareth Marshall at GJMA@bas.ac.uk.