As one of nine tipping elements of the Earth system (Schellnhuber 2009; Lenton 2021), the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is losing mass at an accelerated rate, with a cumulatively contribution to the global sea level rise of 6.9 ± 0.6 mm since the late 1970s (Rignot et al. 2019). Regional climate change may exert considerable impact on the glacial ice dynamics (e.g., basal melting mediation via Ekman transport) (Kimura et al. 2017) and ice sheet mass balance (e.g., accumulation from precipitation and snow drift; surface melting via warming air temperature), raising concern about flow-on effects. Since 1958, the WAIS experienced significant warming (Steig et al. 2009) with the warming rate of more than doubling the global mean for the second half of the twentieth century. Hence, the WAIS is one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth (Bromwich et al. 2013, 2014). However, over the early twenty-first century, warming over the Antarctic Peninsula transfers to the cooling trends (Turner et al. 2016). Jones et al. (2019) reported the seasonal and annual cooling during 1998–2016 over Byrd Station. Clem et al. (2020) showed that the warming of the South Pole from 1989 to 2018 is accompanied by cooling in Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica.

Much attention has been paid to the contribution of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to Antarctic climate changes. Recent studies have shown that central tropical Pacific forcing between the 1950s and the 2000s was largely responsible for the rapid winter warming in West Antarctica via atmospheric teleconnections through an atmospheric Rossby wave (Ding et al. 2011; Nicolas and Bromwich 2014). Increasing sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the western tropical Pacific result in the cyclonic anomalies in the Weddell Sea, which cause warming in the South Pole and cooling in the Antarctic Peninsula (Clem et al. 2019, 2020). The pattern of SST in the tropical Pacific Ocean has changed, with negative SST anomalies in the equatorial eastern tropical Pacific since the end of the twentieth century, as shown by the negative phase of the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO). Due to the similar spatial patterns of SST anomalies to ESNO, the IPO is also considered as the ENSO-like decadal variability. Thus, to a certain extent, IPO arises as a residual of largely independent ENSO events (Newman et al. 2016; Power et al. 2021). Its changes or phrase transition has been shown to modulate the ENSO teleconnection at the interannual scale (Dong et al. 2018). There still exists question concerning the cooling over the West Antarctica is primarily attributable to what processes and mechanisms and from which areas.