There are strong competing effects such as changes in the large - scale atmospheric circulation,
sea surface temperature changes like El Niño and La Niña and the dynamics of westerly storm tracks that all interact at the mid-latitudes,» said Stanford co-author Matthew Winnick who contributed to the study with fellow doctoral student Daniel Ibarra.
Not exact matches
While natural climate variations
like El Niño do affect the frequency and severity of heat waves from one year to the next, the study suggests the increases are mainly linked to long - term
changes in
sea surface temperatures.
Beyond human activity, tropical
sea surface temperatures further back in time are affected by volcanic eruptions,
changes in the intensity of sunlight and natural events
like El Niño.
The study stops short of attributing California's latest drought to
changes in Arctic
sea ice, partly because there are other phenomena that play a role,
like warm
sea surface temperatures and
changes to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, an atmospheric climate pattern that typically shifts every 20 to 30 years.
I wonder what would happen if the same approach was applied to other climate metrics,
like sea surface temperature, water vapor feedback strength, and precipitation - evaporation
changes.
Re 9 wili — I know of a paper suggesting, as I recall, that enhanced «backradiation» (downward radiation reaching the
surface emitted by the air / clouds) contributed more to Arctic amplification specifically in the cold part of the year (just to be clear, backradiation should generally increase with any warming (aside from greenhouse feedbacks) and more so with a warming due to an increase in the greenhouse effect (including feedbacks
like water vapor and, if positive, clouds, though regional
changes in water vapor and clouds can go against the global trend); otherwise it was always my understanding that the albedo feedback was key (while
sea ice decreases so far have been more a summer phenomenon (when it would be warmer to begin with), the heat capacity of the
sea prevents much
temperature response, but there is a greater build up of heat from the albedo feedback, and this is released in the cold part of the year when ice forms later or would have formed or would have been thicker; the seasonal effect of reduced winter snow cover decreasing at those latitudes which still recieve sunlight in the winter would not be so delayed).
For example,
temperature changes on
sea surfaces can signal widespread weather shifts
like El Niño.
As a result, directly comparing the
Sea Surface Temperature data from the early 20th century to the current
Sea Surface Temperature data is
like «comparing apples and oranges» — there have been too many
changes in the data sources for such comparisons to have much meaning.
The bottom right map shows results from models in which things
like greenhouse gases,
sea surface temperatures, and
sea ice were allowed to
change as they have in the real world due to human activities.
In a study last year, the U.S. Climate
Change Science Program indicated that an increase in
sea -
surface temperatures would lead to a proliferation of ocean bacteria species
like Vibrio vulnificus and Vibrio parahaemolyticus that cause seafood - borne diseases.
One NASA oceanographer told Scientific American that the world's
seas, not
surface temperatures, should be the current barometer of climate
change because their
temperatures are going up «
like gangbusters.»