Atlantic Ocean influence on a shift in European climate in the 1990s

European climate exhibits variability on a wide range of timescales. Understanding the nature and drivers of this variability is an essential step in developing robust climate predictions and risk assessments. The Atlantic Ocean has been suggested as an important driver of variability in European climate on decadal timescales1, but the importance of this influence in recent decades has been unclear, partly because of difficulties in separating the influence of the Atlantic Ocean from other contributions, for example, from the tropical Pacific Ocean and the stratosphere. Here we analyse four data sets derived from observations to show that, during the 1990s, there was a substantial shift in European climate towards a pattern characterized by anomalously wet summers in northern Europe, and hot, dry, summers in southern Europe, with related shifts in spring and autumn. These changes in climate coincided with a substantial warming of the North Atlantic Ocean, towards a state last seen in the 1950s. The patterns of European climate change in the 1990s are consistent with earlier changes attributed to the influence of the North Atlantic Ocean, and provide compelling evidence that the Atlantic Ocean was the key driver. Our results suggest that the recent pattern of anomalies in European climate will persist as long as the North Atlantic Ocean remains anomalously warm

Attribution of multi-annual to decadal changes in the climate system: The Large Ensemble Single Forcing Model Intercomparison Project (LESFMIP)

Multi-annual to decadal changes in climate are accompanied by changes in extreme events that cause major impacts on society and severe challenges for adaptation. Early warnings of such changes are now potentially possible through operational decadal predictions. However, improved understanding of the causes of regional changes in climate on these timescales is needed both to attribute recent events and to gain further confidence in forecasts. Here we document the Large Ensemble Single Forcing Model Intercomparison Project that will address this need through coordinated model experiments enabling the impacts of different external drivers to be isolated. We highlight the need to account for model errors and propose an attribution approach that exploits differences between models to diagnose the real-world situation and overcomes potential errors in atmospheric circulation changes. The experiments and analysis proposed here will provide substantial improvements to our ability to understand near-term changes in climate and will support the World Climate Research Program Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation Response to Idealized External Forcing

The response of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to idealized external (solar) forcing is studied in terms of the internal (unforced) AMOC modes with the Kiel Climate Model (KCM), a coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice general circulation model. The statistical investigation of KCM’s internal AMOC variability obtained from a multi-millennial control run yields three distinct modes: a multi-decadal mode with a period of about 60 years, a quasi-centennial mode with a period of about 100 years and a multi-centennial mode with a period of about 300–400 years. Most variance is explained by the multi-centennial mode, and the least by the quasi-centennial mode. The solar constant varies sinusoidally with two different periods (100 and 60 years) in forced runs with KCM. The AMOC response to the external forcing is rather complex and nonlinear. It involves strong changes in the frequency structure of the variability. While the control run depicts multi-timescale behavior, the AMOC variability in the experiment with 100 year forcing period is channeled into a relatively narrow band centered near the forcing period. It is the quasi-centennial AMOC mode with a period of just under 100 years which is excited, although it is heavily damped in the control run. Thus, the quasi-centennial mode retains its period which does not correspond exactly to the forcing period. Surprisingly, the quasi-centennial mode is also most strongly excited when the forcing period is set to 60 years, the period of the multi-decadal mode which is rather prominent in the control run. It is largely the spatial structure of the forcing rather than its period that determines which of the three internal AMOC modes is excited. The results suggest that we need to understand the full modal structure of the internal AMOC variability in order to understand the circulation’s response to external forcing. This could be a challenge for climate models: we cannot necessarily expect that the response to external forcing is realistically captured by a model, even if only strongly damped modes are not well represented that do not account for much variance under present-day conditions

Croll revisited: Why is the northern hemisphere warmer than the southern hemisphere?

The question of why, in the annual-mean, the northern hemisphere (NH) is warmer than the southern hemisphere (SH) is addressed, revisiting an 1870 paper by James Croll. We first show that ocean is warmer than land in general which, acting alone, would make the SH, with greater ocean fraction, warmer. Croll was aware of this and thought it was caused by greater specific humidity and greenhouse trapping over ocean than over land. However, for any given temperature, it is shown that greenhouse trapping is actually greater over land. Instead, oceans are warmer than land because of the smaller surface albedo. However, hemispheric differences in planetary albedo are negligible because the impact of differences in land-sea fraction are offset by the SH ocean and land reflecting more than their NH counterparts. In the absence of a role for albedo differences it is shown that, in agreement with Croll, northward cross-equatorial ocean heat transport (X-OHT) is critical for the warmer NH. This is examined in a simple box model based on the energy budget of each hemisphere. The hemispheric difference forced by X-OHT is enhanced by the positive water vapor-greenhouse feedback, and is partly compensated by the southward atmospheric energy transport. Due to uncertainties in the ocean data, a range of X-OHT is considered. A X-OHT of larger than 0.5 PW is needed to explain the warmer NH solely by X-OHT. For smaller X-OHT, a larger basic state greenhouse trapping in the NH, conceived as imposed by continental geometry, needs to be imposed. Numerical experiments with a GCM coupled to a slab ocean provide evidence that X-OHT is fundamentally important in determining the hemispheric differences in temperature. Therefore, despite some modifications to his theory, analysis of modern data confirms Croll's 140-year-old theory that the warmer NH is partly because of northward X-OHT.close1