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Reconciling disparate twentieth-century Indo-Pacific ocean temperature trends in the instrumental record

Nature Climate Change volume 2, pages 691–699 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Large discrepancies exist between twentieth-century tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature trends determined from present reconstructions. These discrepancies prevent an unambiguous verification and validation of climate models used for projections of future climate change. Here we demonstrate that a more consistent and robust trend among all the reconstructions is found by filtering each data set to remove El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is represented not by a single-index time series but rather by an evolving dynamical process. That is, the discrepancies seem to be largely the result of different estimates of ENSO variability in each reconstruction. The robust ENSO-residual trend pattern represents a strengthening of the equatorial Pacific temperature gradient since 1900, owing to a systematic warming trend in the warm pool and weak cooling in the cold tongue. Similarly, the ENSO-residual trend in sea-level pressure represents no weakening of the equatorial Walker circulation over the same period. Additionally, none of the disparate estimates of post-1900 total eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperature trends are larger than can be generated by statistically stationary, stochastically forced empirical models that reproduce ENSO evolution in each reconstruction.

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Figure 1: Unfiltered SST trends, 1900–2010.
Figure 2: Canonical peak ENSO pattern, determined by regressing ocean temperature and wind stress anomalies on the leading principal component (PC1) of 1958–2007 SODA seasonal mean SST anomalies. PC1 explains 34.7% of the total seasonal mean SST variance.
Figure 3: SODA ENSO-residual ocean temperature and wind-stress trend pattern and time series.
Figure 4: HadISST (blue), ERSST (red), KAPLAN (cyan) and COBE (black) time series.
Figure 5: ENSO-residual SST trends, 1900–2010.
Figure 6: HadSLP2r anomalies for the 1870–2010 period (relative to a 1891–2010 climatology) smoothed with a ten-year running mean.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank J. Barsugli, C. Penland, M. Alexander, G. Compo, P. Sardeshmukh, R. Dole, B. Neff, R. Webb and C. Deser for comments. This work was supported by grants from the NOAA OAR CVP programme and NSF AGS 1125561 and 1035325.

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  1. Physical Sciences Division, CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, University of Colorado, and NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0216, USA

    Amy Solomon & Matthew Newman

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Both authors contributed to all aspects of the work presented in this paper, including the design of the study, analysis of the results and writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Amy Solomon.

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Solomon, A., Newman, M. Reconciling disparate twentieth-century Indo-Pacific ocean temperature trends in the instrumental record. Nature Clim Change 2, 691–699 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1591

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