Not exact matches
«There is high confidence that the El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will remain the dominant
mode of natural climate
variability in the 21st century with global influences in the 21st century, and that
regional rainfall
variability it induces likely intensifies.
The attribution
of the term at
regional scales is complicated by significant
regional variations in temperature changes due to the the influence
of modes of climate
variability such as the North Atlantic Oscillation and the El Nino / Southern Oscillation.
The authors conclude that the there is a higher retreat - rate for marine terminating glaciers in the recent warm period; in the 1930s when there is a natural
mode of variability active that caused
regional temperatures around Greenland to be anomalously warm, there was a higher retreat rate for land - terminating glaciers (the lower retreat rate today is in part because they are currently smaller).
In addition to
regional climate change being strongly affected by natural
modes of variability, geographic differences in climate change are related to the uneven spatial distribution
of aerosols and tropospheric ozone.
Part
of this is a resolution issue, but the more important issue is the
modes of natural internal
variability, which the climate models do a so - so job on in a large - scale sense, but not in translating the impacts to a
regional level.
«A climate pattern may come in the form
of a regular cycle, like the diurnal cycle or the seasonal cycle; a quasi periodic event, like El Niño; or a highly irregular event, such as a volcanic winter... A
mode of variability is a climate pattern with identifiable characteristics, specific
regional effects, and often oscillatory behavior... the
mode of variability with the greatest effect on climates worldwide is the seasonal cycle, followed by El Niño - Southern Oscillation, followed by thermohaline circulation.»
Original study: Messié, M. and F.P. Chavez, 2011: Global
modes of sea surface temperature
variability in relation to
regional climate indices.
«The authors write that North Pacific Decadal
Variability (NPDV) «is a key component in predictability studies
of both
regional and global climate change,»... they emphasize that given the links between both the PDO and the NPGO with global climate, the accurate characterization and the degree
of predictability
of these two
modes in coupled climate models is an important «open question in climate dynamics» that needs to be addressed... report that model - derived «temporal and spatial statistics
of the North Pacific Ocean
modes exhibit significant discrepancies from observations in their twentieth - century climate... conclude that «for implications on future climate change, the coupled climate models show no consensus on projected future changes in frequency
of either the first or second leading pattern
of North Pacific SST anomalies,» and they say that «the lack
of a consensus in changes in either
mode also affects confidence in projected changes in the overlying atmospheric circulation.»»
In view
of the multiple
modes and periods
of internal
variability in the ocean, it is likely that we have not detected the full scale
of internal
variability effects on
regional and global sea level change.
These range from simple averaging
of regional data and scaling
of the resulting series so that its mean and standard deviation match those
of the observed record over some period
of overlap (Jones et al., 1998; Crowley and Lowery, 2000), to complex climate field reconstruction, where large - scale
modes of spatial climate
variability are linked to patterns
of variability in the proxy network via a multivariate transfer function that explicitly provides estimates
of the spatio - temporal changes in past temperatures, and from which large - scale average temperature changes are derived by averaging the climate estimates across the required region (Mann et al., 1998; Rutherford et al., 2003, 2005).
My favorite quote from that paper is: «Because ENSO is the dominant
mode of climate
variability at interannual time scales, the lack
of consistency in the model predictions
of the response
of ENSO to global warming currently limits our confidence in using these predictions to address adaptive societal concerns, such as
regional impacts or extremes (Joseph and Nigam 2006; Power et al. 2006).»