Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Contribution of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation to twentieth-century global surface temperature trends

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 1005–1008 (2016)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Longer-term externally forced trends in global mean surface temperatures (GMSTs) are embedded in the background noise of internally generated multidecadal variability1. A key mode of internal variability is the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), which contributed to a reduced GMST trend during the early 2000s1,2,3. We use a novel, physical phenomenon-based approach to quantify the contribution from a source of internally generated multidecadal variability—the IPO—to multidecadal GMST trends. Here we show that the largest IPO contributions occurred in its positive phase during the rapid warming periods from 1910–1941 and 1971–1995, with the IPO contributing 71% and 75%, respectively, to the difference between the median values of the externally forced trends and observed trends. The IPO transition from positive to negative in the late-1990s contributed 27% of the discrepancy between model median estimates of the forced part of the GMST trend and the observed trend from 1995 to 2013, with additional contributions that are probably due to internal variability outside of the Pacific4 and an externally forced response from small volcanic eruptions5. Understanding and quantifying the contribution of a specific source of internally generated variability—the IPO—to GMST trends is necessary to improve decadal climate prediction skill.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Observed IPO compared to multi-model internally generated IPO and externally forced response from aerosols and greenhouse gases.
Figure 2: IPO contributions to observed GMST trends.

References

  1. Fyfe, J. et al. Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 224–228 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Kosaka, Y. & Xie, S.-P. Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling. Nature 501, 403–407 (2013).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Trenberth, K. E. Has there been a hiatus? Science 349, 691–692 (2015).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Dai, A., Fyfe, J. C., Xie, S.-P. & Dai, X. Decadal modulation of global surface temperature by internal climate variability. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 555–559 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Santer, B. D. et al. Volcanic contributions to decadal changes in tropospheric temperature. Nat. Geosci. 7, 185–189 (2014).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Meehl, G. A., Teng, H. & Arblaster, J. M. Climate model simulations of the observed early-2000s hiatus of global warming. Nat. Clim. Change 4, 898–902 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Santer, B. D. et al. Observed multivariable signals of late 20th and early 21st century volcanic activity. Geophys. Res. Lett. 42, 500–509 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Maher, N., McGregor, S., England, M. H. & Sen Gupta, A. Effects of volcanism on tropical variability. Geophys. Res. Lett. 42, 6024–6033 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Meehl, G. A., Hu, A. & Santer, B. D. The mid-1970s climate shift in the Pacific and the relative roles of forced versus inherent decadal variability. J. Clim. 22, 780–792 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Meehl, G. A. et al. Model-based evidence of deep-ocean heat uptake during surface-temperature hiatus periods. Nat. Clim. Change 1, 360–364 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Meehl, G. A., Hu, A., Arblaster, J. M., Fasullo, J. & Trenberth, K. E. Externally forced and internally generated decadal climate variability associated with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. J. Clim. 26, 7298–7310 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Meehl, G. A. & Teng, H. Case studies for initialized decadal hindcasts and predictions for the Pacific region. Geophys. Res. Lett. 39, L22705 (2012).

    Google Scholar 

  13. Solomon, S. et al. The persistently variable “background” stratospheric aerosol layer and global climate change. Science 333, 866–870 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. Ridley, D. A. et al. Total volcanic stratospheric aerosol optical depths and implications for global climate change. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 7763–7769 (2014).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Andersson, S. M. et al. Significant radiative impact of volcanic aerosol in the lowermost stratosphere. Nat. Commun. 6, 7692 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Watanabe, M. et al. Contribution of natural decadal variability to global warming acceleration and hiatus. Nat. Clim. Change 4, 893–897 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Maher, N., Sen Gupta, A. & England, M. H. Drivers of decadal hiatus periods in the 20th and 21st centuries. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 5978–5986 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Meehl, G. A., Arblaster, J. M., Bitz, C., Chung, C. T. Y. & Teng, H. Antarctic sea ice expansion between 2000–2014 driven by tropical Pacific decadal climate variability. Nat. Geosci. 9, 590–595 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  19. Meehl, G. A., Hu, A. & Teng, H. Initialized decadal prediction for transition to positive phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. Nat. Commun. 7, 11718 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors thank C. Tebaldi for her contributions to formulating the GMST trend distributions and for stimulating discussions on how to quantify the relative roles of internal variability and externally forced response, and G. Jones for providing the masked CMIP5 model data. Portions of this study were supported by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program (RGCM) of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER) Cooperative Agreement # DE-FC02-97ER62402 and the National Science Foundation. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado 80301, USA

    Gerald A. Meehl & Aixue Hu

  2. Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550, USA

    Benjamin D. Santer

  3. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92037, USA

    Shang-Ping Xie

Authors
  1. Gerald A. Meehl
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Aixue Hu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Benjamin D. Santer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Shang-Ping Xie
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

G.A.M. directed this work with contributions from all authors. G.A.M., A.H. and B.D.S. contributed to model data analysis. G.A.M., A.H., B.D.S. and S.-P.X. contributed to writing the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gerald A. Meehl.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information (PDF 2149 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Meehl, G., Hu, A., Santer, B. et al. Contribution of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation to twentieth-century global surface temperature trends. Nature Clim Change 6, 1005–1008 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3107

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3107

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing