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  • CORRESPONDENCE

Rare forecasted climate event under way in the Southern Hemisphere

  1. Harry H. Hendon

    1. Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia.

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  2. D. W. J. Thompson

    1. Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.

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  3. Eun-Pa Lim

    1. Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia.

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  4. Amy H. Butler

    1. CIRES/NOAA/ESRL, Boulder, Colorado, USA.

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  5. Paul. A. Newman

    1. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA.

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  6. Lawrence Coy

    1. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA.

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  7. Adam Scaife

    1. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK.

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  8. Inna Polichtchouk

    1. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK.

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  9. Rene S. Garreaud

    1. Department of Geophysics, University of Chile, Chile.

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  10. Theodore G. Shepherd

    1. Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK.

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  11. Hisashi Nakamura

    1. Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Japan.

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A large polar stratospheric warming is under way in the Southern Hemisphere. It is expected to be on a par with the last large event, in 2002, according to the Australia Bureau of Meteorology, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and the Japan Meteorological Agency. The ability to forecast these rare occurrences has improved hugely in the past decade owing to dramatic advances in the fusion of weather and climate prediction.

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Nature 573, 495 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02858-0

This article is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 media outlets to highlight the issue of climate change.

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