A zonal wavenumber 3 pattern of Northern Hemisphere wintertime planetary wave variability at high latitudes

A prominent pattern of variability of the Northern Hemisphere wintertime tropospheric planetary waves, referred to here as the Wave3 pattern, is identified from the NCEP-NCAR reanalysis. It is worthy of attention because its structure is similar to the linear trend pattern as well as the leading pattern of multidecadal variability of the planetary waves during the past half century. The Wave3 pattern is defined as the second empirical orthogonal function (EOF) of detrended December-February mean 300-hPa meridional wind V300 and denotes a zonal shift of the ridges and troughs of the climatological flow. Although its interannual variance is roughly comparable to that of EOF1 of V300, which represents the Pacific-North America (PNA) pattern, its multidecadal variance is nearly twice as large as that of the PNA. Wave3 is not completely structurally or temporally distinct from the northern annular mode (NAM) but, for some attributes, the linkage of the observed trend to Wave3 is clearer than to NAM. The prominence of the Wave3 pattern is further supported by attributes of many climate models that participated in phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3). In particular, in the Community Climate System Model, version 3 (CCSM3), the Wave3 pattern is present as EOF3 of V300 in both a fully coupled integration and a stand-alone atmospheric integration forced by climatological sea surface temperatures. Its existence in the latter experiment indicates that the pattern can be produced by atmospheric processes alone.