The intra-annual variability of Antarctic precipitation from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts short-term meteorological forecasts and from climate simulations by the ARPÈGE and LMD-Zoom general circulation models is presented and discussed. The spatial resolution of forecasts and simulations is high over the Antarctic region, about 100 km, so that the impact of topography and small-scale atmospheric dynamics are better resolved than with more conventional model grids (about 300 km). All the models and forecasts show that the seasonality of precipitation is spatially very variable. Meridional coast-to-interior contrasts are marked, but equally strong variations are unexpectedly found where more homogeneity might be expected because of the homogeneity of the environment, e.g. on the high Antarctic plateau. Neither the forecasts nor the simulations confirm that precipitation is mostly maximum in winter over much of East Antarctica as suggested by scarce and potentially unreliable observations (Bromwich, 1988). Spring and fall maxima are quite frequent too, though summer maxima are rare. Daily precipitation statistics show more spatial pattern, with increasingly infrequent precipitation as distance from the coast toward the interior of the ice sheet increases Several aspects of the intra-annual variability of precipitation can be interpreted in terms of atmospheric dynamics, but at both daily and seasonal time-scales the different forecasts and climate simulations often locally and regionally disagree with each other. Discrimination between models and their ability to reproduce the dynamics of Antarctic hydrology, and progress on simulating such aspects of the Antarctic climate, is limited by the lack of reliable observation of precipitation variability.