Using clustering analysis for the sea level pressure field of the ERA-Interim reanalysis between 1979 and 2016, five synoptic pressure patterns have been obtained for the Drake area and Antarctic Peninsula (AP) region (45°–75°S, 20°–120°W), and the resulting daily series has been made available to the scientific community. The five patterns have been named according to their most important features as follows: low over the Weddell Sea (LWS), low over the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas (LAB), low over the Drake Passage (LDP), zonal flow over the Drake Passage (ZDP), and ridge over the Antarctic Peninsula (RAP). Each atmospheric pattern is described after analyzing its development and evolution. A frequency analysis shows that the five atmospheric patterns present a similar annual frequency but a large seasonal variability. The transitions from one pattern to another tend to follow a cycle in which synoptic atmospheric waves are displaced eastward by a quarter wavelength. Four of the five atmospheric patterns (all except RAP) are very influenced by the southern annular mode (SAM); however, only LAB and LWS are influenced to some degree by ENSO. The occurrence of the LAB pattern presents a positive trend showing agreement with other studies that indicate an enhancement of the Amundsen–Bellingshausen Seas low. Finally, atmospheric circulation patterns have been related to the airmass advection and precipitation in Livingston Island, showing the potential application for studying the changes in the surface mass balance on the AP cryosphere.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Antarctic Peninsula region has undergone a long and sustained warming period, followed by a shorter but also sustained cooling period, and then a very recent return to warming conditions. All of these have profoundly impacted the glaciers peripheral to the Antarctic Peninsula. This paper focuses on the analysis of the surface mass balance monitoring of such glaciers by the glaciological method, complemented by the analysis of mass-balance estimates by geodetic methods, as well as frontal ablation estimates. We aim to summarize the current knowledge and outline the main challenges faced by investigating the mass balance of such peripheral glaciers and their current contribution to sea-level rise.

The surface restitution method we present reconstructs the evolution of a glacier surface between two time-separated surface topographies using seasonal surface mass balance (SMB) data. A conservative and systematic error analysis is included, based on the availability of surface elevation measurements within the period. The method is applied from 2001 to 2013 at Hurd Glacier (a 4 km2 glacier), where we have sufficient SMB and elevation data. We estimate surface elevation changes in two steps: (1) elevation change due to SMB and (2) elevation change due to glacier dynamics. Four different models of the method are compared depending on whether or not accumulation is memorised at each time step and whether they employ balance profiles or SMB maps. Models are validated by comparing a set of surface measurements retrieved in 2007 with the corresponding restituted elevations. Although surface elevation change between 2001 and 2007 was larger than 10 m, more than 80% of the points restituted by the four models showed errors below ±1 m compared to only 33% when predicted by a linear interpolator. As error estimates between models differ by 0.10 m, we recommend the simplest model, which does not memorise accumulation and interpolates SMB by elevation profiles.