Hydrological cycle changes under global warming and their effects on multiscale climate variability.

Despite a globally uniform increase in the concentrations of emitted greenhouse gases, radiatively forced surface warming can have significant spatial variations. These define warming patterns that depend on preexisting climate states and through atmospheric and oceanic dynamics can drive changes of the hydrological cycle with global-scale feedbacks. Our study reviews research progress on the hydrological cycle changes and their effects on multiscale climate variability. Overall, interannual variability is expected to become stronger in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and weaker in the Atlantic. Global monsoon rainfall is projected to increase and the wet season to lengthen despite a slowdown of atmospheric circulation. Strong variations among monsoon regions are likely to emerge, depending on surface conditions such as orography and land-sea contrast. Interdecadal climate variability is expected to modulate the globally averaged surface temperature change with pronounced anomalies in the polar and equatorial regions, leading to prolonged periods of enhanced or reduced warming. It is emphasized that advanced global observations, regional simulations, and process-level investigations are essential for improvements in understanding, predicting, and projecting the modes of climate variability, monsoon sensitivity, and energetic fluctuations in a warming climate.

Systematic Scatterometer Wind Errors Near Coastal Mountains.

Satellite scatterometers provide the only regular observations of surface wind vectors over vast swaths of the world oceans, including coastal regions, which are of great scientific and societal interest but still present challenges for remote sensing. Here we demonstrate systematic scatterometer wind errors near Hawaii's Big Island: Two counter-rotating lee vortices, which are clear in the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set ship-based wind climatology and in aircraft observations, are absent in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Remote Sensing Systems scatterometer wind climatologies. We demonstrate similar errors in the representation of transient Catalina Eddy events in the Southern California Bight. These errors likely arise from the nonuniqueness of scatterometer wind observations, that is, an "ambiguity removal" is required during processing to select from multiple wind solutions to the geophysical model function. We discuss strategies to improve the ambiguity selection near coastal mountains, where small-scale wind reversals are common.

Early 20th-century Arctic warming intensified by Pacific and Atlantic multidecadal variability.

With amplified warming and record sea ice loss, the Arctic is the canary of global warming. The historical Arctic warming is poorly understood, limiting our confidence in model projections. Specifically, Arctic surface air temperature increased rapidly over the early 20th century, at rates comparable to those of recent decades despite much weaker greenhouse gas forcing. Here, we show that the concurrent phase shift of Pacific and Atlantic interdecadal variability modes is the major driver for the rapid early 20th-century Arctic warming. Atmospheric model simulations successfully reproduce the early Arctic warming when the interdecadal variability of sea surface temperature (SST) is properly prescribed. The early 20th-century Arctic warming is associated with positive SST anomalies over the tropical and North Atlantic and a Pacific SST pattern reminiscent of the positive phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation. Atmospheric circulation changes are important for the early 20th-century Arctic warming. The equatorial Pacific warming deepens the Aleutian low, advecting warm air into the North American Arctic. The extratropical North Atlantic and North Pacific SST warming strengthens surface westerly winds over northern Eurasia, intensifying the warming there. Coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations support the constructive intensification of Arctic warming by a concurrent, negative-to-positive phase shift of the Pacific and Atlantic interdecadal modes. Our results aid attributing the historical Arctic warming and thereby constrain the amplified warming projected for this important region.

Slowdown of the Walker circulation driven by tropical Indo-Pacific warming.

Global mean sea surface temperature (SST) has risen steadily over the past century, but the overall pattern contains extensive and often uncertain spatial variations, with potentially important effects on regional precipitation. Observations suggest a slowdown of the zonal atmospheric overturning circulation above the tropical Pacific Ocean (the Walker circulation) over the twentieth century. Although this change has been attributed to a muted hydrological cycle forced by global warming, the effect of SST warming patterns has not been explored and quantified. Here we perform experiments using an atmospheric model, and find that SST warming patterns are the main cause of the weakened Walker circulation over the past six decades (1950-2009). The SST trend reconstructed from bucket-sampled SST and night-time marine surface air temperature features a reduced zonal gradient in the tropical Indo-Pacific Ocean, a change consistent with subsurface temperature observations. Model experiments with this trend pattern robustly simulate the observed changes, including the Walker circulation slowdown and the eastward shift of atmospheric convection from the Indonesian maritime continent to the central tropical Pacific. Our results cannot establish whether the observed changes are due to natural variability or anthropogenic global warming, but they do show that the observed slowdown in the Walker circulation is presumably driven by oceanic rather than atmospheric processes.