The Impact of Underestimated Southern Ocean Freshening on Simulated Historical Sea Surface Temperature Trends

Abstract Climate models generally overestimate observed Southern Ocean surface warming trends over the past three decades. This discrepancy could be due to biased surface freshwater fluxes in climate models, which underestimate observed precipitation increases and do not account for Antarctic Ice Sheet and shelf mass loss. Though past modeling experiments show surface cooling in response to freshwater perturbations, sea surface temperature (SST) responses vary widely across models. To address these ambiguities, we compute linear SST response functions for standardized freshwater flux increases across a subset of CMIP6 models. For 1990–2021, underestimated freshwater fluxes can explain up to 60% of the model‐observation SST trend difference. The response functions reveal that Southern Ocean SST trends are more sensitive to freshwater fluxes concentrated along the Antarctic margin versus more spatially distributed fluxes. Our results quantify, for the first time, the impact of missing freshwater forcing on Southern Ocean SST trends across a multi‐model ensemble.