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Atmospheric rivers in Antarctica

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 6, pages 178–192 (2025)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 17 April 2025

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Abstract

Antarctic atmospheric rivers (ARs) are a form of extreme weather that transport heat and moisture from the Southern Hemisphere subtropics and/or mid-latitudes to the Antarctic continent. Present-day AR events generally have a positive influence on the Antarctic ice-sheet mass balance by producing heavy snowfall, yet they also cause melt of sea ice and coastal ice sheet areas, as well as ice shelf destabilization. In this Review, we explore the atmospheric dynamics and impacts of Antarctic ARs over their life cycle to better understand their net contributions to ice-sheet mass balance. ARs occur in high-amplitude pressure couplets, and those strong enough to reach the Antarctic are often formed within Rossby waves initiated by tropical convection. Antarctic ARs are rare events (~3 days per year per location) but have been responsible for 50–70% of extreme snowfall events in East Antarctica since the 1980s. However, they can also trigger extensive surface melting events, such as the final ice shelf collapse of Larsen A in 1995 and Larsen B in 2002. Climate change will likely cause stronger ARs as anthropogenic warming increases atmospheric water vapour. Future research must determine how these climate change impacts will alter the relationship among Antarctic ARs, net ice-sheet mass balance and future sea-level rise.

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Fig. 1: The dynamics of a landfalling Antarctic AR.
Fig. 2: AR frequency, trends and projections.
Fig. 3: Antarctic AR extremes.
Fig. 4: AR impacts.

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Data availability

ERA5 data produced by ECMWF are available through the Copernicus Climate Data Store (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-pressure-levels?tab = overview). MERRA-2 data are publicly available at the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets?project = MERRA-2). The code for the Wille et al. 2021 AR detection algorithm discussed in this study is publicly available (https://zenodo.org/record/7990215). Data for Fig. 2a are from ref. 7 and data for Fig. 2b are from ref. 49 with both data sets extended until 2020. The authors acknowledge use of imagery from the NASA Worldview application (https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov), part of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), in Box 3.

Change history

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Acknowledgements

J.D.W. acknowledges support from the Horizon 2020 project nextGEMS under grant agreement number 101003470. K.S.M. acknowledges support from the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) mission, NASA grant 80NSSC18K1485. X.Z. acknowledges support from NSF Grants 2229392. Y.M. was supported by the NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology programme (award number 80NSSC24K0012). J.E.B. was supported by the National Science Foundation for Long Term Ecological Research number OPP-2224760. C.A.S. acknowledges support by the Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) component of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER) under Award Number DE-SC0022070, as well as National Center for Atmospheric Research, sponsored by NSF, under Cooperative Agreement Number 1852977. K.R.C. acknowledges support from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund grant MFP-VUW2010. G.L. was supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship programme. A.C.W. and R.B. acknowledge financial support from the University of Colorado Boulder. M.L.M. acknowledges support from NASA grant 80NSSC21K1610 and the University of Colorado Boulder. I.V.G. thanks the support by the strategic funding to CIIMAR (UIDB/04423/2020 and UIDP/04423/2020), 2021.03140.CEECIND, projects ATLACE (CIRCNA/CAC/0273/2019), MAPS (2022.09201.PTDC) and Portuguese Polar Program (PROPOLAR) through national funds provided by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia). D.B. acknowledges support from ANID-FONDECYT-1240190, ANID-FONDAP-1523A0002 and COPAS COASTAL ANID FB210021. A.C. and S.K. acknowledge funding support from the Ukrainian State Special-Purpose Research Program in Antarctica for 2011–2022, research direction: Hydrometeorology; and they express their gratitude to their Ukrainian polar science co-workers known as the ‘Squad of Combat Penguins’.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jonathan D. Wille, Vincent Favier, Irina V. Gorodetskaya.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Jonathan D. Wille

  2. Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement, CNRS/UGA/IRD/G-INP, Saint Martin d’Hères, France

    Vincent Favier

  3. CIIMAR, Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Irina V. Gorodetskaya & Claudio Durán-Alarcón

  4. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, UMR 8212 CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Université Paris-Saclay, IPSL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Cécile Agosta, Mathieu Casado & Christophe Leroy-Dos Santos

  5. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Rebecca Baiman, Michelle L. Maclennan, Andrew C. Winters & Ziqi Yin

  6. Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    J. E. Barrett

  7. Laboratoire d’Océanographie et du Climat, LOCEAN-IPSL, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, IRD, MNHN, Paris, France

    Léonard Barthelemy & Francis Codron

  8. Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Burcu Boza & Emir Toker

  9. Department of Meteorology, University of Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile

    Deniz Bozkurt

  10. Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR)2, Santiago, Chile

    Deniz Bozkurt

  11. Center for Oceanographic Research COPAS COASTAL, University of Concepción, Concepción, Chile

    Deniz Bozkurt

  12. Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute, Kyiv, Ukraine

    Anastasiia Chyhareva & Svitlana Krakovska

  13. National Antarctic Scientific Center of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine

    Anastasiia Chyhareva & Svitlana Krakovska

  14. School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Kyle R. Clem

  15. Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Rajashree Tri Datta

  16. Environmental and Geophysical Sciences (ENGEOS) Lab, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Diana Francis

  17. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA

    Andrew O. Hoffman

  18. Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

    Marlen Kolbe

  19. Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Gabrielle Linscott

  20. Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin — Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Kyle S. Mattingly

  21. Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Ye Mu

  22. Biogéosciences, CNRS/Université Bourgogne Europe, Dijon, France

    Benjamin Pohl

  23. Climate and Global Dynamics Lab, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Christine A. Shields

  24. CW3E, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Xun Zou & Zhenhai Zhang

  25. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Chen Zhang

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Contributions

J.D.W., V.F. and I.V.G. led the Review. All authors contributed to the researching of data, writing and reviewing and editing of the manuscript, with authors B.P., R.B., I.V.G., C.A.S., M.L.M., X.Z., D.B., V.F., J.D.W. and R.D. leading the contributions to specific sections. Figure and display items were led by the following authors: B.P. (Fig. 1), R.B. (Figs. 1 and 2), X.Z. (Figs. 1 and 3), A.O.H. (Fig. 4), I.V.G. (Boxes 1 and 2) and V.F. and J.D.W. (Box 3).

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jonathan D. Wille.

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Competing interests

C.A.S. is an associate editor for NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Science. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Reviews Earth & Environment thanks Sergi González-Herrero, Qinghua Yang, Ella Gilbert and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Wille, J.D., Favier, V., Gorodetskaya, I.V. et al. Atmospheric rivers in Antarctica. Nat Rev Earth Environ 6, 178–192 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00638-7

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