The effects of temperature on sulfur dioxide (SO2) contamination in PEMFCs are investigated by operating single cells with 2 ppm SO2 in the cathode at different temperatures. Cell performance response shows that voltage degradation was delayed and appears a transition of multiple processes at low temperatures: a similar performance loss is observed when performances reached steady state. The restored performance from the reversible and the irreversible degradations highly depends on temperature. At low temperature, the performance recovery is only negligible with neat air operation (self-recovery), while full recovery is observed after cyclic voltammetry (CV) scanning. As temperature increased, so did the self-recovery performance. However, the total recovery performance decreased. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy analysis indicates that the potential-dependent poisoning process was delayed at low temperature, and the removal of the sulfur species from Pt/C was inhibited during the self-recovery. Water balance analysis implies that the delay could be attributed to the effect of liquid water scavenging and the mass transport of SO2 in the membrane electrode assemblies. The CV analysis confirms that the decomposition/desorption of the sulfur adsorbates was inhibited and indicates that the SO2 crossover from the cathode to the anode side was also mitigated at low temperature. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.