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Pacific trade winds accelerated by aerosol forcing over the past two decades

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 768–772 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Pacific trade winds, coupled with the zonal sea surface temperature gradient in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, control regional sea levels1, and therefore their trend is a great concern in the Pacific Rim. Over the past two decades, easterly winds have been accelerated in association with eastern tropical Pacific cooling2. They may represent natural interdecadal variability in the Pacific3 and possibly explain the recent global warming hiatus4,5,6,7. However, the intensification of the winds has been the strongest ever observed in the past century2,5,8, the reason for which is still unclear. Here we show, using multiple climate simulations for 1921–2014 by a global climate model, that approximately one-third of the trade-wind intensification for 1991–2010 can be attributed to changes in sulfate aerosols. The multidecadal sea surface temperature anomaly induced mostly by volcanic aerosols dominates in the western North Pacific, and its sign changed rapidly from negative to positive in the 1990s, coherently with Atlantic multidecadal variability9,10,11. The western North Pacific warming resulted in intensification of trade winds to the west of the dateline. These trends have not contributed much to the global warming hiatus, but have greatly impacted rainfall over the western Pacific islands.

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Figure 1: Two dominant decadal SST patterns and time series for 1936–2009.
Figure 2: Multidecadal SST variability in the WNP for 1931–2014.
Figure 3: Observed and simulated trends during 1991–2010.
Figure 4: Twenty-year trends in the Pacific trade winds and associated ocean anomalies for 1935–2010.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the modelling groups, the Program For Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) for their efforts in making the CMIP5 multi-model data set available. We thank T. Tanaka for running MIROC5.2. This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid 24241009 and the Program for Risk Information on Climate Change (SOUSEI program) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan.

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  1. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8568, Japan

    Chiharu Takahashi & Masahiro Watanabe

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  1. Chiharu Takahashi
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  2. Masahiro Watanabe
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Contributions

M.W. designed the study, conducted the numerical experiments, and wrote the paper. C.T. performed the analysis, prepared the figures, and helped write the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Masahiro Watanabe.

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Takahashi, C., Watanabe, M. Pacific trade winds accelerated by aerosol forcing over the past two decades. Nature Clim Change 6, 768–772 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2996

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