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Pacific contribution to the early twentieth-century warming in the Arctic

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 793–797 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Arctic surface temperature warmed more than twice as fast as global temperature during the early twentieth century, similar to that during the recent global warming. This Arctic warming has been attributed to both external forcing1 and internal variability associated with atmospheric dynamics2,3 and Atlantic Ocean temperature4 in combination with Pacific variability5. Here we show, through coupled climate model experiments that superpose externally forced and dynamically driven changes, that Pacific decadal variability alone was a key contributor to the early twentieth century Arctic warming. Sea surface temperatures in the model are phased to observations by prescribing historical wind variations over the Pacific, which drive thermodynamically consistent decadal variations. During the early twentieth century, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) transitioned to a positive phase with a concomitant deepening of the Aleutian Low that warms the Arctic by poleward low-level advection of extratropical air. In addition, our experiments revealed that the implemented Pacific surface changes weaken the polar vortex, which leads to subsidence-induced adiabatic heating of the Arctic surface. Thus, our results suggest that the observed recent shift to the positive PDO phase6 will intensify Arctic warming in the forthcoming decades.

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Fig. 1: Arctic surface temperature.
Fig. 2: Change in surface temperature and SLP.
Fig. 3: Change in vertical temperature and geopotential height (GPH) in the Arctic.
Fig. 4: Geopotential height (GPH).
Fig. 5: Additional experiments.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the JPI-Climate/Belmont Forum project InterDec, the Research Council of Norway through the EPOCASA (no. 229774) project, the ERC STERCP project (Grant Agreement no. 648982), and UNINETT Sigma2 with CPU (nn9039k) and storage (ns9039k) resources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway

    Lea Svendsen, Noel Keenlyside & Nour-Eddine Omrani

  2. Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway

    Noel Keenlyside & Yongqi Gao

  3. Uni Research Climate and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway

    Ingo Bethke

  4. Nansen-Zhu International Research Center, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China

    Yongqi Gao

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  1. Lea Svendsen
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Contributions

L.S. and I.B. performed the experiments. L.S. performed the analysis and wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to the discussion, interpretation of the results and editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Lea Svendsen.

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Svendsen, L., Keenlyside, N., Bethke, I. et al. Pacific contribution to the early twentieth-century warming in the Arctic. Nature Clim Change 8, 793–797 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0247-1

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