ClimaTea Journal Club: "Pacific Sea Surface Temperature and the Winter of 2014"

Date: 

Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Location: 

HUCE Seminar Room
Andy Rhines and Cristian Proistosescu will be presenting Hartmann (2015), "Pacific sea surface temperature and the winter of 2014."
Andy and Cristian have the following to say about the paper:

This paper shows that the third mode of North Pacific SST variability has been unusually positive since 2013, and that it may be related to anomalous North American conditions during the past two winters. Using several reanalyses and GCM ensembles, circulation anomalies associated with this pattern are shown to lead to warm and dry conditions in western North America, and to cold conditions in the East. Though extratropical anomalies are the most prominent visual feature of the mode smaller tropical anomalies are argued to force both the atmospheric response and the extratropical SSTs. The mode has also been more active since the late 1970s, leading to some interesting discussion about whether anthropogenic forcing could project onto this variability (see, e.g., https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/tropics-prime-suspect-behind-warm-cold-split-over-north-america-during).

 

 

grl52667.pdf1.76 MB