According to the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, the U.S. government agency tasked with monitoring, assessing and predicting the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, cycle (El Niño and La Niña),
current global atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns are consistent with ENSO - neutral conditions in the tropical Pacific.
Not exact matches
World weather patterns will also start to change, as a frigid Antarctic continent and the icy ocean
currents that surround it play an important role in
global atmospheric and oceanic
circulation.
To derive the climate projections for this assessment, we employed 20 general
circulation models to consider two scenarios of
global carbon emissions: one where
atmospheric greenhouse gases are stabilized by the end of the century and the other where it grows on its
current path (the stabilization [RCP4.5] and business - as - usual [RCP8.5] emission scenarios, respectively).
The corresponding intensification of the
atmospheric Walker
circulation is also associated with sea surface cooling in the eastern Pacific, which has been identified as one of the contributors to the
current pause in
global surface warming.
Current global multi-decadal predictions are unable to skillfully simulate regional forcing by major
atmospheric circulation features such as from El Niño and La Niña and the South Asian monsoon, much less changes in the statistics of these climate features.
This empirical finding contradicts Spencer's hypothesis that cloud cover changes are driving
global warming, but is consistent with our
current understanding of the climate: ocean heat is exchanged with the atmosphere, which causes surface warming, which alters
atmospheric circulation, which alters cloud cover, which impacts surface temperature.
``... the moisture budget and its role in
global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in
atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity -LSB-...] the development of the
current theory for the Hadley
Circulation, -LSB-...] the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere.
And noting «zonal mean - winds constitute an important element of
global atmospheric circulation,» they go on to suggest,» if the solar cycle can influence zonal mean - winds, then it may affect other features of
global climate as well, including oscillations such as the NAO and MJO, of which zonal winds are an ingredient» Thus, «the cause of this forcing» as they describe it, «likely involves some combination of solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, ionosphere - Earth
currents and cloud microphysics.»
Using a state - of - the - art data assimilation system and surface pressure observations, the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is generating a six - hourly, four - dimensional
global atmospheric dataset spanning 1851 to 2014 to place
current atmospheric circulation patterns into a historical perspective.