Global impacts of recent Southern Ocean cooling
Since the beginning of the satellite era, Southern Ocean sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have cooled, despite global warming. While observed Southern Ocean cooling has pre-viously been reported to have minimal impact on the tropical Pacific, the efficiency of this teleconnection has recently shown to be mediated by subtropical cloud feedbacks that are highly model-dependent. Here, we conduct a coupled model intercomparison of paired ensemble simulations under historical radiative forcing: one with freely evolving SSTs and the other with Southern Ocean SST anomalies constrained to follow observa-tions. We reveal a global impact of observed Southern Ocean cooling in the model with stronger (and more realistic) cloud feedbacks, including Antarctic sea-ice expansion, southeastern tropical Pacific cooling, northward-shifted Hadley circulation, Aleutian low weakening, and North Pacific warming. Our results therefore suggest that observed Southern Ocean SST decrease might have contributed to cooler conditions in the eastern tropical Pacific in recent decades.
document
https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d70c50tk
eng
geoscientificInformation
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publication
2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
publication
2023-07-25T00:00:00Z
Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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