The authors of Lim et al. (2021) have found an error in the code that processed the data displayed in Fig. 2c in the article. The bar graph is supposed to show the September–November mean of the Antarctic polar cap temperature anomalies at the 30-hPa level, but it erroneously shows the September mean of of the temperature anomalies. After fixing the error, the September–November-mean polar cap temperature anomaly of 2019 is higher than that of 2002 by about 25%. The error affects two places in the text of the article: “the mean Antarctic warming over the course of spring 2019 broke the previous record of 2002 by ∼50% in the midstratosphere” in the abstract, and “the polar temperature anomaly was about 50% higher than in 2002 (Fig. 2c)” in the main text on page E1155, where 50% should be replaced by 25%. Nonetheless, the error does not affect the conclusion drawn from Fig. 2c that the Antarctic polar cap temperature of austral spring 2019 in the midstratosphere was the highest on record in the study period of 1979–2019 by a substantial margin from the previous record set in 2002.
Time series of anomalies of the September–November-mean Antarctic temperature south of 60°S at 30 hPa.
Citation: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 105, 4; 10.1175/BAMS-D-23-0300.1
References
Lim, E.-P., and Coauthors, 2021: The 2019 Southern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex weakening and its impacts. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 102, E1150–E1171, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0112.1.
