  The reanalysis datasets provide very important sources for investigating the
climate dynamics and climate changes in Antarctica. In this paper, three major
reanalysis data are compared with Antarctic station data over the last 35
years: the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the National
Center for Atmospheric Research reanalysis (NCEP1), NCEP-DOE Reanalysis 2
(NCEP2), and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Interim
Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim). In our assessment, we compare the linear trends, the
fluctuations around the trends, the persistence properties and the significance
level of warming trends in the reanalysis data with the observational ones. We
find that NCEP1 and NCEP2 show spurious warming trends in all parts of
Antarctica except the Peninsula, while ERA-Interim is quite reliable except at
Amundsen-Scott. To investigate the persistence of the data sets, we consider
the lag-1 autocorrelation $C(1)$ and the Hurst exponent. While $C(1)$ varies
quite erratically in different stations, the Hurst exponent shows similar
patterns all over Antarctica. Regarding the significance of the trends, NCEP1
and NCEP2 differ considerably from the observational datasets by strongly
exaggerating the warming trends. In contrast, ERA-Interim gives reliable
results at most stations except at Amundsen-Scott where it shows a significant
cooling trend.
