Twentieth century tropical sea surface temperature trends revisited

This study compares the global distribution of 20th century SST and marine air temperature trends from a wide variety of data sets including un‐interpolated archives as well as globally‐complete reconstructions. Apart from the eastern equatorial Pacific, all datasets show consistency in their statis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical research letters 2010-05, Vol.37 (10), p.n/a
Main Authors: Deser, Clara, Phillips, Adam S., Alexander, Michael A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air temperature
Atmospheric sciences
Atmospherics
Climate change
climate trends
Cooling
Earth
Earth sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Equatorial regions
Exact sciences and technology
Geophysics
Marine
Ocean-atmosphere interaction
Oceans
Physical oceanography
Reconstruction
Sea surface temperature
Trends
tropical Pacific
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Summary:This study compares the global distribution of 20th century SST and marine air temperature trends from a wide variety of data sets including un‐interpolated archives as well as globally‐complete reconstructions. Apart from the eastern equatorial Pacific, all datasets show consistency in their statistically significant trends, with warming everywhere except the far northwestern Atlantic; the largest warming trends are found in the middle latitudes of both hemispheres. Two of the SST reconstructions exhibit statistically significant cooling trends over the eastern equatorial Pacific, in disagreement with the un‐interpolated SST and marine air temperature datasets which show statistically significant warming in this region. Twentieth century trends in tropical marine cloudiness, precipitation and SLP from independent data sets provide physically consistent evidence for a reduction in the strength of the atmospheric Walker Circulation accompanied by an eastward shift of deep convection from the western to the central equatorial Pacific.
ISSN:0094-8276
1944-8007
DOI:10.1029/2010GL043321