Journal
JOURNAL OF CLIMATE
Volume 29, Issue 22, Pages 8051-8065Publisher
AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0318.1
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Basic Research Program of China [2014CB953904, 2012CB955604]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [41575088, 41461164005]
- Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study investigates how intermodel differences in large-scale ocean dynamics affect the tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) warming (TPSW) pattern under global warming, as projected by 32 models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The largest cause of intermodel TPSW differences is related to the cloud-radiation feedback. After removing the effect of cloud-radiation feedback, the authors find that differences in ocean advection play the next largest role, explaining around 14% of the total intermodel variance in TPSW. Of particular importance are differences in climatological zonal overturning circulation among the models. With the robust enhancement of ocean stratification across models, models with relatively strong climatological upwelling tend to have relatively weak SST warming in the eastern Pacific. Meanwhile, the pronounced intermodel differences in ocean overturning changes contribute little to uncertainty in the TPSW pattern. The intermodel differences in climatological zonal overturning are found to be associated with the intermodel spread in climatological SST. In most CMIP5 models, there is a common cold tongue associated with an overly strong overturning in the climatology simulation, implying a La Nina-like bias in the TPSW pattern projected by the MME of the CMIP5models. This provides further evidence for the projection that the TPSW pattern should be closer to an El Nino-like pattern than the MME projection.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available