The Arctic plays a pivotal role in the Earth’s climate system, with its rapid transformation exerting profound impacts on global climate dynamics, ecosystems, and human societies. In recent decades, Arctic warming has significantly outpaced the global mean temperature increase, driving enhanced sea ice decline, accelerated mass loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet, permafrost degradation, and glacier retreat. These changes modulate atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns, establishing teleconnections with mid- and low-latitude climate systems. Investigating the historical evolution, current state, and projected future trends of the Arctic climate system, as well as its global impacts, is crucial for elucidating the mechanisms underlying Arctic amplification, refining climate change projections, attributing extreme weather and climate events, and informing sustainable development strategies.

Recent advances in high-resolution climate modeling, satellite remote sensing, paleoclimate reconstructions from ice cores and sediments, and other observational techniques have significantly improved our understanding of the multi-sphere interactions within the Arctic climate system and their global linkages. To foster interdisciplinary collaboration and the exchange of cutting-edge research findings, Advances in Polar Science (APS) invites the following esteemed researchers to form a guest editorial team for co-hosting of publishing a Special Issue titled "Changes of the Arctic Climate System and Its Global Connections": Professor Qinglong You (Fudan University, China), Associate Professor Ruonan Zhang (Fudan University, China), Professor Xuejia Wang (Lanzhou University, China), Professor Yulan Zhang (Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Professor Yubao Qiu (Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Dr. Kunhui Ye (University of Oxford, UK).

In 2024，the International Arctic Science Committee officially determined the seven priority research areas of the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP IV), and the specific content of these priority areas will be compiled in 2025. The planning of the priority research areas of ICARP IV will lay an important foundation for the Fifth International Polar Year (IPY5). This special issue mainly solicits papers focusing on Research Priority Team 1 (RPT1) of ICARP IV“The Role of the Arctic in the Global System”，and Research Priority Team 2 (RPT2) “Observing, Reconstructing, and Predicting Future Climate Dynamics and Ecosystem”.

APS is an international, peer-reviewed and open-access journal sponsored by the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC) and Chinese Society for Oceanography (CSO). Since 2015, APS has become more truly international, and been improving, with its inclusion in Elsevier’s Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature in May of 2020. Articles published on APS are free of charge with generous funding from PRIC. APS pays particular attention to publishing original papers from early career scientists through providing language polishing services. For more details, please visit APS website: aps.chinare.org.cn

This special issue will be published in June 2026, as the general issue (Vol. 37, No.2) of APS. As this will be a scheduled special issue, there will be strict adherence to the following deadlines.

l October 30, 2025 — deadline for submitting abstracts of possible contributions;

l February 1, 2026 — deadline for submitting a manuscript for this issue;

l May 15, 2026 — deadline for submission of the final accepted manuscript;

l June 30, 2026 — publication date.

Submission Instructions:

(1) Manuscripts should be original and unpublished works, complying with the principles of academic integrity.

(2) Article types include Articles (research papers), Reviews, Opinion-Editorials (commentaries), Trends & Letters, etc.

(3) The limit extension for each manuscript is of 15 pages (about 10,000 words).

(4) Please prepare your manuscript according to the APS’s submission guidelines.

The themes of the special issue include, but are not limited to:

(1) Observations of the coupled processes among the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land in the Arctic;

(2) The climatic processes and mutual feedback mechanisms of the Arctic climate system; 

(3) The linkages between Arctic changes and the climate at mid and low latitudes as well as extreme weather and climate events, and their dynamic mechanisms;

(4) Prediction and forecasting of the Arctic climate system and its applications.

We sincerely invite you to contribute to this issue.

Guest Editors:

Professor Qinglong You，Associate Professor Ruonan Zhang，Professor Xuejia Wang，Professor Yulan Zhang，Professor Yubao Qiu，Dr. Kunhui Ye.

Editorial Office:

Contact to Dr. Sai Zhang, Dr. Luo Wang

Tel: 086-21-58713642, 58713650

Email: journal@pric.org.cn