2013 Articles
Stationarity of the Tropical Pacific Teleconnection to North America in CMIP5/PMIP3 Model Simulations
The temporal stationarity of the teleconnection between the tropical Pacific Ocean and North America (NA) is analyzed in atmosphere-only, and coupled last-millennium, historical, and control runs from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 data archive. The teleconnection, defined as the correlation between December-January-February (DJF) tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and DJF 200 mb geopotential height, is found to be nonstationary on multidecadal timescales. There are significant changes in the spatial features of the teleconnection over NA in continuous 56-year segments of the last millennium and control simulations. Analysis of atmosphere-only simulations forced with observed SSTs indicates that atmospheric noise cannot account for the temporal variability of the teleconnection, which instead is likely explained by the strength of, and multidecadal changes in, tropical Pacific Ocean variability. These results have implications for teleconnection-based analyses of model fidelity in simulating precipitation, as well as any reconstruction and forecasting efforts that assume stationarity of the observed teleconnection.
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Also Published In
- Title
- Geophysical Research Letters
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50938
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
- Earth and Environmental Sciences
- Ocean and Climate Physics
- Biology and Paleo Environment
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union
- Published Here
- May 20, 2014