1,721,016 research outputs found
An improved ensemble of land surface air temperatures since 1880 using revised pair-wise homogenization algorithms accounting for autocorrelation
No full textLand surface air temperatures (LSAT) inferred from weather station data differ among major research groups. The estimate by NOAA's monthly Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCNm) averages 0.028C cooler between 1880 and 1940 than Berkeley Earth's and 0.148C cooler than the Climate Research Unit estimates. Such systematic offsets can arise from differences in how poorly documented changes in measurement characteristics are detected and adjusted. Building upon an existing pairwise homogenization algorithm used in generating the fourth version of NOAA's GHCNm(V4), PHA0, we propose two revisions to account for autocorrelation in climate variables. One version, PHA1, makes minimal modification to PHA0 by extending the threshold used in breakpoint detection to be a function of LSAT autocorrelation. The other version, PHA2, uses penalized likelihood to detect breakpoints through optimizing a modelselection problem globally. To facilitate efficient optimization for series with more than 1000 time steps, a multiparent genetic algorithm is proposed for PHA2. Tests on synthetic data generated by adding breakpoints to CMIP6 simulations and realizations from a Gaussian process indicate that PHA1 and PHA2 both similarly outperform PHA0 in recovering accurate climatic trends. Applied to unhomogenized GHCNmV4, both revised algorithms detect breakpoints that correspond with available station metadata. Uncertainties are estimated by perturbing algorithmic parameters, and an ensemble is constructed by pooling 50 PHA1- and 50 PHA2-based members. The continental-mean warming in this new ensemble is consistent with that of Berkeley Earth, despite using different homogenization approaches. Relative to unhomogenized data, our homogenization increases the 1880-2022 trend by 0.16 [0.12, 0.19]8C century21 (95% confidence interval), leading to continental-mean warming of 1.65 [1.62, 1.69]8C over 2010-22 relative to 1880-1900.</p
Predictability of SST-Modulated Westerly Wind Bursts
No full textWesterly wind bursts (WWBs), a significant player in ENSO dynamics, are modeled using an observationally motivated statistical approach that relates the characteristics of WWBs to the large-scale sea surface temperature. Although the WWB wind stress at a given location may be a nonlinear function of SST, the characteristics of WWBs are well described as a linear function of SST. Over 50% of the interannual variance in the WWB likelihood, zonal location, duration, and fetch is explained by changes in SST. The model captures what is seen in a 17-yr record of satellite-derived winds: the eastward migration and increased occurrence of wind bursts as the western Pacific warm pool extends. The WWB model shows significant skill in predicting the interannual variability of the characteristics of WWBs, while the prediction skill of the WWB seasonal cycle is limited by the record length of available data. The novel formulation of the WWB model can be implemented in a stochastic or deterministic mode, where the deterministic mode predicts the ensemble-mean WWB characteristics. Therefore, the WWB model is especially appropriate for ensemble prediction experiments with existing ENSO models that are not capable of simulating realistic WWBs on their own. Should only the slowly varying component of WWBs be important for ENSO prediction, this WWB model allows a shortcut to directly compute the slowly varying ensemble-mean wind field without performing many realizations.McDonnell FoundationNational Aeronautics and Space AdministrationNational Science Foundation Climate Dynamics Program (Grant ATM-0351123
A Dynamically Consistent ENsemble of Temperature at the Earth surface since 1850 from the DCENT dataset
No full textAccurate historical records of Earth’s surface temperatures are central to climate research and policy development. Widely- used estimates based on instrumental measurements from land and sea are, however, not fully consistent at either global or regional scales. To address these challenges, we develop the Dynamically Consistent ENsemble of Temperature (DCENT), a 200-member ensemble of monthly surface temperature anomalies relative to the 1982–2014 climatology. Each DCENT member starts from 1850 and has a 5⇥5 resolution. DCENT leverages several updated or recently-developed approaches of data homogenization and bias adjustments: an optimized pairwise homogenization algorithm for identifying breakpoints in land surface air temperature records, a physics-informed inter-comparison method to adjust systematic offsets in sea-surface temperatures recorded by ships, and a coupled energy balance model to homogenize continental and marine records. Each approach was published individually, and this paper describes a combined approach and its application in developing a gridded analysis. A notable difference of DCENT relative to existing temperature estimates is a cooler baseline for 1850–1900 that implies greater historical warming
Global and Regional Discrepancies between Early-Twentieth-Century Coastal Air and Sea Surface Temperature Detected by a Coupled Energy-Balance Analysis
No full textA major uncertainty in reconstructing historical sea surface temperature (SST) before the 1990s in- volves correcting for systematic offsets associated with bucket and engine-room intake temperature measurements. A recent study used a linear scaling of coastal station-based air temperatures (SATs) to infer nearby SSTs, but the physics in the coupling between SATs and SSTs generally gives rise to more complex regional air–sea temperature differences. In this study, an energy-balance model (EBM) of air–sea thermal coupling is adapted for predicting near-coast SSTs from coastal SATs. The model is shown to be more skillful than linear-scaling approaches through cross-validation analyses using instrumental records after the 1960s and CMIP6 simulations between 1880 and 2020. Improved skill primarily comes from capturing features reflecting air–sea heat fluxes dominating temperature vari- ability at high latitudes, including damping high-frequency wintertime SAT variability and reproducing the phase lag between SSTs and SATs. Inferred near-coast SSTs allow for intercalibrating coastal SAT and SST measurements at a variety of spatial scales. The 1900–40 mean offset between the latest SST estimates available from the Met Office (HadSST4) and SAT-inferred SSTs range between 21.68C (95% confidence interval: [21.78, 21.48C]) and 1.28C ([0.88, 1.68C]) across 108 3 108 grids. When further averaged along the global coastline, HadSST4 is signifi- cantly colder than SAT-inferred SSTs by 0.208C ([0.078, 0.358C]) over 1900–40. These results indicate that historical SATs and SSTs involve substantial inconsistencies at both regional and global scales. Major outstanding questions involve the distribution of errors between our intercalibration model and instrumental records of SAT and SST as well as the degree to which coastal intercalibrations are informative of global trends
Total Matrix Intercomparison: A Method for Determining the Geometry of Water-Mass Pathways
Full text linkOcean tracer distributions have long been used to decompose the deep ocean into constituent water masses, but previous inverse methods have generally been limited to just a few water masses that have been defined by a subjective choice of static property combinations. Through air–sea interaction and upper-ocean processes, all surface locations are potential sources of distinct tracer properties, and thus it is natural to define a distinct water type for each surface site. Here, a new box inversion method is developed to explore the contributions of all surface locations to the ocean interior, as well as the degree to which the observed tracer fields can be explained by a steady-state circulation with unchanging surface-boundary conditions. The total matrix intercomparison (TMI) method is a novel way to invert observations to solve for the pathways connecting every surface point to every interior point. In the limiting case that the circulation is steady and that five conservative tracers are perfectly observed, the TMI method unambiguously recovers the complete pathways information, owing to the fact that each grid box has, at most, six neighbors. Modern-day climatologies of temperature, salinity, phosphate, nitrate, oxygen, and oxygen-18/oxygen-16 isotope ratios are simultaneously inverted at 4° × 4° grid resolution with 33 vertical levels. Using boundary conditions at the surface and seafloor, the entire interior distribution of the observed tracers is reconstructed using the TMI method. Assuming that seafloor fluxes of tracer properties can be neglected, the method suggests that 25% or less of the water residing in the deep North Pacific originated in the North Atlantic. Integrating over the global ocean, the Southern Ocean is dominant, as the inversion indicates that almost 60% of the ocean volume originates from south of the Southern Hemisphere subtropical front
Historical Indian Ocean Temperature Change
No full textGebbie, G., 2022: Historical Indian Ocean Temperature Change.
These codes for calculating Indian Ocean basinwide temperature change accompany the paper:
Wenegrat, J.O., E. Bonanno, U. Rack, and G. Gebbie, 2022: A century of observed temperature change in the Indian Ocean. Geophys. Res. Lett., in press, 2022
Tracer transport timescales and the observed Atlantic-Pacific lag in the timing of the Last Termination
Full text linkAuthor Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Paleoceanography 27 (2012): PA3225, doi:10.1029/2011PA002273.The midpoint of the Last Termination occurred 4,000 years earlier in the deep Atlantic than the deep Pacific according to a pair of benthic foraminiferal δ18O records, seemingly implying an internal circulation shift because the lag is much longer than the deep radiocarbon age. Here a scenario where the lag is instead caused by regional surface boundary condition changes, delays due to oceanic transit timescales, and the interplay between temperature and seawater δ18O (δ18Ow) is quantified with a tracer transport model of the modern-day ocean circulation. Using an inverse method with individual Green functions for 2,806 surface sources, a time history of surface temperature and δ18Ow is reconstructed for the last 30,000 years that is consistent with the foraminiferal oxygen-isotope data, Mg/Ca-derived deep temperature, and glacial pore water records. Thus, in the case that the ocean circulation was relatively unchanged between glacial and modern times, the interbasin lag could be explained by the relatively late local glacial maximum around Antarctica where surface δ18Ow continues to rise even after the North Atlantic δ18Ow falls. The arrival of the signal of the Termination is delayed at the Pacific core site due to the destructive interference of the still-rising Antarctic signal and the falling North Atlantic signal. This scenario is only possible because the ocean is not a single conveyor belt where all waters at the Pacific core site previously passed the Atlantic core site, but instead the Pacific core site is bathed more prominently by waters with a direct Antarctic source.G.G. is supported by NSF grant OIA-1124880 and the WHOI
Arctic Research Initiative.2013-03-0
Can paleoceanographic tracers constrain meridional circulation rates?
Full text linkAuthor Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 37 (2007): 394-407, doi:10.1175/jpo3018.1.The ability of paleoceanographic tracers to constrain rates of transport is examined using an inverse method to combine idealized observations with a geostrophic model. Considered are the spatial distribution, accuracy, and types of tracers required to constrain changes in meridional transport within an idealized single-hemisphere basin. Measurements of density and radioactive tracers each act to constrain rates of transport. Conservative tracers, while not of themselves able to inform regarding rates of transport, improve constraints when coupled with density or radioactive observations. It is found that the tracer data would require an accuracy one order of magnitude better than is presently available for paleo-observations to conclusively rule out factor-of-2 changes in meridional transport, even when assumed available over the entire model domain. When data are available only at the margins and bottom of the model, radiocarbon is unable to constrain transport while density remains effective only when a reference velocity level is assumed. The difficulty in constraining the circulation in this idealized model indicates that placing firm bounds on past meridional transport rates will prove challenging.The first author is supported by the NOAA Postdoctoral
Program in Climate and Global Change and GG
by the National Ocean Partnership Program (ECCO).
Author OM acknowledges support from the National
Science Foundation
Atlantic warming since the little ice age
Full text linkAuthor Posting. © Oceanography Society, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Gebbie, G. Atlantic warming since the little ice age. Oceanography, 32(1), (2019):220-230, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2019.151.Radiocarbon observations suggest that the deep Atlantic Ocean takes up to several centuries to fully respond to changes at the sea surface. Thus, the ocean’s memory is longer than the modern instrumental period of oceanography, and the determination of modern warming of the subsurface Atlantic requires information from paleoceanographic data sets. In particular, paleoceanographic proxy data compiled by the Ocean2k project indicate that there was a global cooling from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age over the years 900−1800, followed by modern warming that began around 1850. An ocean simulation that is forced by a combined instrumental-proxy reconstruction of surface temperatures over the last 2,000 years shows that the deep Atlantic continues to cool even after the surface starts warming. As a consequence of the multicentury surface climate history, the ocean simulation suggests that the deep Atlantic doesn’t take up as much heat during the modern warming era as the case where the ocean was in equilibrium at 1750. Both historical hydrographic observations and proxy records of the subsurface Atlantic are needed to determine whether the effects of the Little Ice Age did indeed persist well after the surface climate had already shifted to warmer conditions.The author thanks Peter Huybers for collaborating on the Common Era temperature evolution, Lars Henrik Smedsrud for the encouragement to write this manuscript and compute heat fluxes, and to Ellen Kappel, Paul Durack, and Alex Sen Gupta for their handling of the manuscript. GG is supported by the James E. and Barbara V. Moltz Fellowship and NSF OCE-1357121. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to the author
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