Abstract
Rapid Arctic warming has reached 2–4 times the global average, contrasting with the cooling trend in mid-high latitude Eurasia during the 1990s–2010s. A notable phenomenon of the “warm Arctic-cold Eurasia” (WACE) pattern is its frequent phase reversal between early and late winter seen in the last decade. As one of the important drivers of climate variability, the role of the stratosphere in WACE reversal remains unclear. Here, we find that approximately 25 days before WACE reversal, the morphology of the stratospheric polar vortex over North America-North Atlantic undergoes a transition between stretching and contraction. Through vertical wave coupling and downward propagation, this stratospheric transition effectively modulates the key atmospheric circulation responsible for the WACE reversal. CMIP6 models including complete stratospheric processes can successfully simulate the WACE reversal induced by the stratospheric precursor, while low-top models fail to capture this linkage. Our findings deepen the understanding of cold-warm transition events from a stratosphere-troposphere coupling perspective.
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Data availability
Daily meteorological data on surface and pressure levels from ERA5, including surface air temperature, potential vorticity, geopotential height, zonal wind, meridional winds are available at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-single-levels?tab=overview and https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-pressure-levels?tab=overview. Daily surface air temperature and geopotential height of the CMIP6 historical simulation are available at https://esgf-metagrid.cloud.dkrz.de/search. Daily surface air temperature and geopotential height at 50 hPa of the CESM-LE historical simulation are available at https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d651027/dataaccess/#. The data underlying each figure of this study are available in the Zenodo repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18623601.
Code availability
The computer codes for analyzing data and drawing plots are developed in NCAR Command Language (available at https://www.ncl.ucar.edu/). The computer codes used in this study are available in the Zenodo repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18623601.
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Acknowledgements
Funding: National Natural Science Foundation of China 42394125 to Z.Y., 42505058 to Y.Z., and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of CPSF GZB20250077 to Y.Z.
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Y.Z., Z.Y. conceived and designed the study; Y.Z., Z.Y., and S.H. performed the analyses; Y.Z., Z.Y., wrote the draft paper; W.T., S.H., and P.H. helped improve the paper. All authors discussed the results and contributed to writing the paper.
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Zhang, Y., Yin, Z., Tian, W. et al. Stratospheric precursor induces wintertime phase reversal of the “warm Arctic-cold Eurasia” pattern. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70100-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70100-3
