Sentences with phrase «tropical pacific»

The researchers found that Mount Pinatubo's eruption still kept much of the world dry, even after taking into consideration the drying effects of El Niño an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific.

Hendy, E. J., Gagan M. K., Alibert C. A., McCulloch M. T., Lough J. M. and Isdale P.J. (2002) Abrupt Decrease in Tropical Pacific Sea Surface Salinity at End of Little Ice Age, Science, 295, 1511 - 154.

that climate models can not account for the observations we already have let alone make adequate predictions about what will happen in the future.that century - scale variations in tropical Pacific climate modes can significantly modulate radiatively forced shifts in global temperature.»

LONDON, 28 September, 2015 − El Niño, that periodic bubble of heat that hits the tropical Pacific every few years, has nothing to do with climate change — but the phenomenon could be made much more devastating by climate change, according to two new studies.

And note that the eastern tropical Pacific is negatively correlated, indicating that these areas warm during La Niña events.

Member of the team Alena Kimbrough says, «We've shown ENSO is an important part of the climate system that has influenced global temperatures and rainfall over the past millennium... Our findings, together with climate model simulations, highlight the likelihood that century - scale variations in tropical Pacific climate modes can significantly modulate radiatively forced shifts in global temperature.»

It is also observed for interannual variations of Ga with SST during the El Nino in the tropical Pacific (12).

There is a tendancy for the tropical Pacific to «rebound» out of an El Nino into a La Nina, as the underlying dynamics are fundamentallly oscillatory.

Consequently, some models have tropical Pacific variability that is smaller than observed, while for some it is larger than observed (this is mostly a function of the ocean model resolution and climatological depth of the equatorial thermocline — but a full description is beyond the scope of a blog post).

It's important to note that a substantial short - term influence on the globe's average temperature, the cycle of El Niño warmth and La Niña cooling in the tropical Pacific Ocean, was in the warm phase until May but a La Niña cooling is forecast later this year, according to the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The forecast said there was substantial risk of bleaching in parts of the Pacific Ocean, as well, and noted that this did not include the extra heat anticipated from a developing El Niño warming of the tropical Pacific.

The strongest internal variability in the climate system on this time scale is the change from El Niño to La Niña — a natural, stochastic «seesaw» in the tropical Pacific called ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation).

In short, an objective look at the data is equivocal at best as to the true trend in the tropical Pacific ocean - atmosphere system over the past century.

However, the region of high temperatures expands into central and eastern parts of the tropical Pacific during an El Nino resulting in an increased area of SST higher than the critical threshold value, and this aspect is in my opinion crucial to the interpretation.

Since the Eastern Tropical Pacific is not entirely decoupled from West Wind Drift given the general pattern of circulation in the SE Pacific, the question arises is the magnitude of the observed overall energy difference in the recently observed «extended» La Nina phase of ENSO condition relative to the the «more normal» ENSO comparable in magnitude to energy associated with the apparent increase in winds and potentially currents around the Antarctic?

The interannual variability, predominantly related to ENSO processes, is different but that too is to be expected given the mainly chaotic nature of tropical Pacific variability, the short time period and the models» known inadequacy in ENSO modelling.

In a news release today, agency biologists said this is the third such worldwide coral bleaching measured in recent decades, with the previous ones in 1998, during a strong El Niño heating of the tropical Pacific, and in 2010.

The second, Keenlyside et al., (2008), forecast in contrast that «global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.»

So the evolution of the tropical Pacific SST gradient across the various GFDL - CM 2.1 ensemble - members is not inconsistent with a tendency towards an SST «La Nina» - like state as shown in the Kaplan / HadISST products.

First of all, according to IPCC (2001) the night - time temperatures have in general increased more than the day - time temperature (the diurnal temperature range, DTR, has decreased in most areas, except over middle Canada, and parts of southern Africa, south - west Asia, Europe, and the western tropical Pacific Islands).

An unprecedented strengthening of Pacific trade winds since the late 1990s has caused widespread climate perturbations, including rapid sea - level rise in the western tropical Pacific, strengthening of Indo - Pacific ocean currents, and an increased uptake of heat in the equatorial Pacific thermocline.

...» the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken to its long - term mean; moreover, North Atlantic SST and European and North American surface temperatures will cool slightly, whereas tropical Pacific SST will remain almost unchanged.

The key is that the tropical Pacific is actually very well sampled (through the TOGA - COARE array) and the patterns you see in the annual means change slowly enough for the heat content anomalies to be well characterised.

And if you nudge a climate model in the tropical Pacific to follow the observed sequence of El Niño and La Niña (rather than generating such events itself in random order), then the model reproduces the observed global temperature evolution including the «hiatus» (Kosaka and Xie 2013).

Chan and Liu (2004) point to a lack of positive correlation between SSTs in the western part of the tropical pacific and the typhoon activity in the western North Pacific.

Federal researchers have published work concluding that a particular variant of the periodic El Niño warmups of the tropical Pacific Ocean is becoming more frequent and stronger.

The increase in these winds has caused eastern tropical Pacific cooling, amplified the Californian drought, accelerated sea level rise three times faster than the global average in the Western Pacific and has slowed the rise of global average surface temperatures since 2001.

This in turn can have had a number of possible causes: «natural» tropical variability — for instance, the winter (DJF) tropical Pacific cooled over these two years, possibly as part of larger - scale ENSO variability.

Many of these events — from an extreme East African drought to Australian deluges — were significantly driven by a «double - dip La Niña» cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, agency scientists said.

, Climate Dynamics, 2005], the conclusion of which is well summarized by the first sentence of their abstract: The potential for the mean climate of the tropical Pacific to shift to more El Niño - like conditions as a result of human induced climate change is subject to a considerable degree of uncertainty..

Of course this is a global average but in principle I see no reason not to consider that some large percentage of the energy warming the tropical Pacific will be from «back radiation» (for which CO2 will be partly responsible) and thus not «direct from the sun.»

As far back as November 2013, the CPC and the IRI have predicted an elevated chance of El Niño (relative to historical chance or climatology) based on a combination of model predictions and general trends over the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Regarding El Nino, here's the recent update from Australia: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/ «The past three or four weeks has seen a gradual strengthening of La Nina indicators: the near - equatorial Pacific has cooled both on and below the surface, the Trade Winds have been mostly stronger than normal and cloudiness has been lower than average over much of the tropical Pacific.

As regards the true nature of the response of the tropical Pacific ocean - atmosphere system to anthropogenic forcing, the real - world evidence seems to be a bit mixed.

It is not officially here yet, but the increasing warmth across the tropical Pacific seems to be changing circulation to cause larger storm events along the US Gulf Coast and Atlantic Seaboard.

Abstract:... Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades — unprecedented in observations / reanalysis data and not captured by climate models — is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake.

This is due to an increase in the trade winds that push water westward across the tropical Pacific, while in the east cold water from the depths comes to the surface (see last graph here).

NASA shows the following graphic, where you can see that the warmer years tend to be those with an El Niño in the tropical Pacific (red years), while the particularly cool years are those with La Niña (blue years).

El Niño is also associated with warm surface water in the eastern tropical Pacific.

The prevailing surface winds over the tropical Pacific blow from east - to - west (easterlies), and tend drive a surface current, pushing (advecting) the warm surface water westward.

Late Pleistocene tropical Pacific temperature sensitivity to radiative greenhouse gas forcing — Dyez & Ravelo (2012)

El Niño, the periodic warming of central and eastern tropical Pacific waters, occurs on average every two to five years and typically lasts about 12 months.

The western tropical Pacific is known as the «warm pool» with the highest sea surface temperature (SST) in the world (on average).

Taking into account the obscuring effects of high cloud, it was found that thick low clouds decreased by more than 20 % in the eastern tropical Pacific... In contrast, most increase in low cloud amount due to doubled CO2 simulated by the NCAR and GFDL models occurs in the subtropical subsidence regimes associated with a strong atmospheric stability.»

Of course, the main event is the still - growing El Niño warmup of the tropical Pacific Ocean, which has worldwide impacts — particularly in poor countries.

... a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades — unprecedented in observations / reanalysis data and not captured by climate models — is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake.

«Late Pleistocene tropical Pacific temperatures suggest higher climate sensitivity than currently thought

It's difficult for me to believe injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere (or dumping iron filings into the tropical Pacific to sequester CO2) could be done with the reasonable assurance that the benefits will outweigh the risks.

La Niña usually refers to the opposite state to an El Niño: low sea surface temperatures in the eastern part of the eastern tropical Pacific.

«During the 1997 — 1998 El Niño, observations indicate that the SST increase in the eastern tropical Pacific enhances the atmospheric convection, which shifts the upward motion to further south and breaks down low stratiform clouds, leading to a decrease in low cloud amount in this region.