Strengthening tropical Pacific zonal sea surface temperature gradient consistent with rising greenhouse gases

Richard Seager (), Mark Cane, Naomi Henderson, Dong-Eun Lee, Ryan Abernathey and Honghai Zhang
Additional contact information
Richard Seager: Columbia University
Mark Cane: Columbia University
Naomi Henderson: Columbia University
Dong-Eun Lee: Columbia University
Ryan Abernathey: Columbia University
Honghai Zhang: Columbia University

Nature Climate Change, 2019, vol. 9, issue 7, 517-522

Abstract: Abstract As exemplified by El Niño, the tropical Pacific Ocean strongly influences regional climates and their variability worldwide1–3. It also regulates the rate of global temperature rise in response to rising GHGs4. The tropical Pacific Ocean response to rising GHGs impacts all of the world’s population. State-of-the-art climate models predict that rising GHGs reduce the west-to-east warm-to-cool sea surface temperature gradient across the equatorial Pacific5. In nature, however, the gradient has strengthened in recent decades as GHG concentrations have risen sharply5. This stark discrepancy between models and observations has troubled the climate research community for two decades. Here, by returning to the fundamental dynamics and thermodynamics of the tropical ocean–atmosphere system, and avoiding sources of model bias, we show that a parsimonious formulation of tropical Pacific dynamics yields a response that is consistent with observations and attributable to rising GHGs. We use the same dynamics to show that the erroneous warming in state-of-the-art models is a consequence of the cold bias of their equatorial cold tongues. The failure of state-of-the-art models to capture the correct response introduces critical error into their projections of climate change in the many regions sensitive to tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0505-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:9:y:2019:i:7:d:10.1038_s41558-019-0505-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-019-0505-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().