dc.contributor.author | McGregor, S | |
dc.contributor.author | Stuecker, MF | |
dc.contributor.author | Kajtar, JB | |
dc.contributor.author | England, MH | |
dc.contributor.author | Collins, M | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2018-07-02T10:10:58Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2018-05-21 | |
dc.description.abstract | Pacific trade winds have displayed unprecedented strengthening in recent decades1. This strengthening has been associated with east Pacific sea surface cooling2and the early twenty-first-century slowdown in global surface warming2,3, amongst a host of other substantial impacts4-9. Although some climate models produce the timing of these recently observed trends10, they all fail to produce the trend magnitude2,11,12. This may in part be related to the apparent model underrepresentation of low-frequency Pacific Ocean variability and decadal wind trends2,11-13or be due to a misrepresentation of a forced response1,14-16or a combination of both. An increasingly prominent connection between the Pacific and Atlantic basins has been identified as a key driver of this strengthening of the Pacific trade winds12,17-20. Here we use targeted climate model experiments to show that combining the recent Atlantic warming trend with the typical climate model bias leads to a substantially underestimated response for the Pacific Ocean wind and surface temperature. The underestimation largely stems from a reduction and eastward shift of the atmospheric heating response to the tropical Atlantic warming trend. This result suggests that the recent Pacific trends and model decadal variability may be better captured by models with improved mean-state climatologies. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC), including the ARC Centre
of Excellence in Climate System Science (ARC grant CE110001028). MFS was supported by the
NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, administered by UCAR’s
Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Sciences (CPAESS). JBK and MC
was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (grant number NE/N005783/1).
We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled
Modelling, which is responsible for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), and we
thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making their model output available. SM
also thanks Dietmar Dommenget for helpful discussions during the early stages of this work | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 8, pp. 493 - 498 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1038/s41558-018-0163-4 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/33339 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | Nature Publishing Group | en_GB |
dc.rights.embargoreason | Under embargo until 21 November 2018 in compliance with publisher policy. | en_GB |
dc.rights | © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. | en_GB |
dc.title | Model tropical Atlantic biases underpin diminished Pacific decadal variability | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.identifier.issn | 1758-678X | |
dc.description | This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record | en_GB |
dc.identifier.journal | Nature Climate Change | en_GB |