An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970

David W. J. Thompson (), John M. Wallace, John J. Kennedy and Phil D. Jones
Additional contact information
David W. J. Thompson: Colorado State University
John M. Wallace: University of Washington
John J. Kennedy: Met Office Hadley Centre, Met Office
Phil D. Jones: Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia

Nature, 2010, vol. 467, issue 7314, 444-447

Abstract: Surprise sea temperature drop in the 1970s Global-mean temperatures did not rise continuously through the twentieth century. Rather, they rose from the start of the century to the 1940s, decreased slightly during the middle part of the century, and rose rapidly from the mid-1970s to the 2000s. The mid-century cooling has been commonly interpreted as the response to a peak in sulphate aerosol production and/or natural climate oscillations. David Thompson and colleagues now show that an abrupt change in sea-surface temperatures around 1970 accounts for a substantial amount of the Northern Hemisphere cooling. The same authors previously identified an anomaly in measurements of sea-surface temperature centred at 1945 ( http://go.nature.com/16G48A ), which was found to be an artefact caused by changes in data-collection methodology. That discovery is leading to some of the largest corrections in the global-mean temperature time series made in recent years. The underlying physical mechanism for the newly identified change in the 1970s remains uncertain, but it was too rapid to have been caused by aerosols or multidecadal variability.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09394 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:nature:v:467:y:2010:i:7314:d:10.1038_nature09394

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

DOI: 10.1038/nature09394

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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