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CLIMATE DYNAMICS

Oscillating American winter temperatures

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 354–355 (2019)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 01 May 2019

This article has been updated

North American winters have varied from mild to extremely cold in recent years. Now, research provides a framework for understanding these changing temperature extremes.

Extreme cold snaps over North America have taken centre stage in the news many times over the past several winters. These cold periods are due, in part, to transient weather phenomena that develop in a chaotic system; however, they are not without some important climatic context. Some winters in the twenty-first century — particularly 2013–2014 (ref. 1) — have been characterized by repeated Arctic outbreaks over much of North America, while others, like 2001–2002 and 2011–2012, were notoriously mild. These alternating cold and mild winters exhibited near opposite temperature departures from normal. Subseasonal to seasonal climate variability can be distilled into various leading patterns of large-scale variability, often called teleconnection patterns. A key teleconnection pattern associated with North American temperature extremes is the North Pacific Oscillation (NPO)2. To date, this discussion has often been in the context of a stationary climate. For example, looking at 1979–2019 data, a clear picture emerges linking the NPO to North American temperature extremes. However, this can obscure the fact that the NPO itself changes over time, leading to an incomplete understanding of this important climate variability. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Mi-Kyung Sung and coauthors3 step into this void with an exciting analysis that looks at how NPO variability changes on decadal time scales. They find that when the tropical Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature gradients resemble La Niña over long periods of time, the NPO pattern is displaced eastward over the North Pacific, more strongly modulating North American temperature patterns.

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Fig. 1: Winter NPO patterns from 1979 to 2019.

Change history

  • 01 May 2019

    In the version of this News & Views originally published, the first author for ref. 3 was incorrectly indicated to be Baek-Min Kim, but should have been Mi-Kyung Sung. The DOI of the linked paper was also incorrectly stated as https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-091-0461-5, but should have been https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0461-5. These errors have now been amended.

References

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  3. Sung, M-. K. et al. Nat. Clim. Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0461-5 (2019).

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  4. Kosaka, Y. & Xie, S.-P. Nature 501, 403–407 (2013).

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  1. NOAA Climate Prediction Center, College Park, MD, USA

    Stephen Baxter

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  1. Stephen Baxter
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Correspondence to Stephen Baxter.

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Baxter, S. Oscillating American winter temperatures. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 354–355 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0469-x

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