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Mechanisms of tropical Pacific decadal variability

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 4, pages 754–769 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Naturally occurring tropical Pacific variations at timescales of 7–70 years — tropical Pacific decadal variability (TPDV) — describe basin-scale sea surface temperature (SST), sea-level pressure and heat content anomalies. Several mechanisms are proposed to explain TPDV, which can originate through oceanic processes, atmospheric processes or as an El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) residual. In this Review, we synthesize knowledge of these mechanisms, their characteristics and contribution to TPDV. Oceanic processes include off-equatorial Rossby waves, which mediate oceanic adjustment and contribute to variations in equatorial thermocline depth and SST; variations in the strength of the shallow upper-ocean overturning circulation, which exhibit a large anti-correlation with equatorial Pacific SST at interannual and decadal timescales; and the propagation of salinity-compensated temperature (spiciness) anomalies from the subtropics to the equatorial thermocline. Atmospheric processes include midlatitude internal variability leading to tropical and subtropical wind anomalies, which result in equatorial SST anomalies and feedbacks that enhance persistence; and atmospheric teleconnections from Atlantic and Indian Ocean SST variability, which induce winds conducive to decadal anomalies of the opposite sign in the Pacific. Although uncertain, the tropical adjustment through Rossby wave activity is likely a dominant mechanism. A deeper understanding of the origin and spectral characteristics of TPDV-related winds is a key priority.

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Fig. 1: Observed Pacific decadal changes.
Fig. 2: Relationship between tropical Pacific decadal variability and El Niño/Southern Oscillation.
Fig. 3: Subtropical cells influence on tropical Pacific decadal variability.
Fig. 4: Assessment of the \({\boldsymbol{v}}{\prime} \bar{{\boldsymbol{T}}}\) hypothesis.
Fig. 5: Atmospheric processes involved in tropical Pacific decadal variability.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is a product of the CLIVAR Pacific Region Panel working group on ‘Tropical Pacific Decadal Variability’. The authors thank CLIVAR for their sponsorship and J. Li at the CLIVAR Program Office for her help. The paper was finalized during a workshop held at Monash University, Australia. The authors acknowledge workshop funding support from the Faculty of Science and the School of Earth Atmosphere and Environment at Monash University, as well as CLIVAR and US CLIVAR. The authors also thank N. Renier from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution graphics team for her help in the preparation of the figure in Box 1. A.C. was supported by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Climate Variability and Predictability (CVP) and Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections (MAPP) programmes and by DOE Award No. DE-SC0023228. S.M. was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant numbers FT160100162 and DP200102329) and the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program (NESP2) Climate Systems Hub. S.C. was supported by IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development). M.F.S. was supported by NSF grant AGS-2141728 and NOAA’s Climate Program Office’s MAPP programme grant NA20OAR4310445. This is IPRC publication 1611 and SOEST contribution 11719. J.S. was supported by NOAA’s Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program (Award NA20OAR4320278). Y.I. and Y.K. were supported by the Program for Advanced Studies of Climate Change Projection (SENTAN, JPMXD0722680395) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. A.S is supported by Australian Government’s NESP and was supported by the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research. K.B.K. was supported by the NASA Sea Level Change Science Program, Award 80NSSC20K1123. N.J.H. and A.S.T. were supported by funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (grant number CE170100023) and acknowledge support from the NESP2 Climate Systems Hub. M.M. was supported by the Austrian Science Fund project P33177. S.S. was supported by the US Department of Energy, DE-SC0019418 and the US National Science Foundation (NSF), OCE-2202794 and AGS-1805143. C.M.-V. was supported by Proyecto ANID Fondecyt 3200621. R.M.H. was supported by the Australian Research Council through grant number DE21010004. C.C.U. was supported by NSF award AGS-2002083 and the James E. and Barbara V. Moltz Fellowship for Climate-Related Research. G.A.M. was supported by the Regional and Global Model Analysis component of the Earth and Environmental System Modelling Program of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research under Award Number DE-SC0022070 and also by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the NSF under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. N.S. acknowledges support from the joint JAMSTEC-IPRC Collaborative Research project JICore and from the US Office of Naval Research through the Climate Resilience Collaborative at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. M.J.M. was supported by NOAA. This is PMEL contribution no. 5499.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Antonietta Capotondi, Kristopher B. Karnauskas, Nicola Maher & Tongtong Xu

  2. NOAA/Physical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, CO, USA

    Antonietta Capotondi & Tongtong Xu

  3. School of Earth Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Shayne McGregor, Rajashree Naha & Peter van Rensch

  4. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Shayne McGregor

  5. NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, WA, USA

    Michael J. McPhaden

  6. LEGOS, Université de Toulouse, IRD, CNES, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse, France

    Sophie Cravatte

  7. IRD, Nouméa, New Caledonia

    Sophie Cravatte

  8. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Neil J. Holbrook

  9. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Neil J. Holbrook

  10. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Chiba, Japan

    Yukiko Imada

  11. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Sara C. Sanchez & Nicola Maher

  12. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Janet Sprintall

  13. Department of Oceanography, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Malte F. Stuecker, Bo Qiu & Niklas Schneider

  14. International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Malte F. Stuecker & Niklas Schneider

  15. Department of Physical Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    Caroline C. Ummenhofer

  16. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Caroline C. Ummenhofer, Agus Santoso & Andréa S. Taschetto

  17. GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany

    Mathias Zeller

  18. Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy

    Riccardo Farneti & Fred Kucharski

  19. National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Giorgio Graffino

  20. CAS Key Laboratory of Ocean Circulation and Waves, Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China

    Shijian Hu & Fan Wang

  21. Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Yu Kosaka

  22. Research Department, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK

    Michael Mayer

  23. Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Michael Mayer

  24. Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Agus Santoso & Andréa S. Taschetto

  25. Climate Science Centre, CSIRO Environment, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Xuebin Zhang

  26. School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Ryan M. Holmes

  27. Institute of Climate Application Research (ICAR)/CIC-FEMD, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Jing-Jia Luo

  28. Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Nicola Maher

  29. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Nicola Maher

  30. Faculty of Engineering and Science, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile

    Cristian Martinez-Villalobos

  31. Data Observatory Foundation, Santiago, Chile

    Cristian Martinez-Villalobos

  32. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Gerald A. Meehl

  33. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Baranra, CA, USA

    Samantha Stevenson

  34. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Aspendale, Victoria, Australia

    Arnold Sullivan

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Contributions

A.C. and S.M. conceived the Review. A.C., S.M., M.J.M., S.C., N.J.H., Y.I., S.C.S., J.S., M.F.S. and M.Z. coordinated the writing of the various sections. A.C., S.M., C.C.U. and S.C.S led the analyses and the preparation of the figures. All authors contributed to the discussion and interpretation of the material and assisted with the writing of the manuscript, led by A.C.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antonietta Capotondi.

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Nature Reviews Earth & Environment thanks Xiaopei Lin, Masami Nonaka, Xichen Li and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Capotondi, A., McGregor, S., McPhaden, M.J. et al. Mechanisms of tropical Pacific decadal variability. Nat Rev Earth Environ 4, 754–769 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00486-x

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