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Possible shift in controls of the tropical Pacific surface warming pattern

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Abstract

Changes in the sea surface temperature (SST) pattern in the tropical Pacific modulate radiative feedbacks to greenhouse gas forcing, the pace of global warming and regional climate impacts. Therefore, elucidating the drivers of the pattern is critically important for reducing uncertainties in future projections. However, the causes of observed changes over recent decades, an enhancement of the zonal SST contrast coupled with a strengthening of the Walker circulation, are still debated. Here we focus on the role of external forcing and review existing mechanisms of the forced response categorized as either an energy perspective that adopts global and hemispheric energy budget constraints or a dynamical perspective that examines the atmosphere–ocean coupled processes. We then discuss their collective and relative contributions to the past and future SST pattern changes and propose a narrative that reconciles them. Although definitive evidence is not yet available, our assessment suggests that the zonal SST contrast has been dominated by strengthening mechanisms in the past, but will shift towards being dominated by weakening mechanisms in the future. Finally, we present opportunities to resolve the model–observations discrepancy regarding the recent trends.

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Fig. 1: Observed changes in the Pacific SST pattern and the Walker circulation.
Fig. 2: Framing associated with the tropical Pacific surface warming pattern.
Fig. 3: Inter-model relationship between the Walker circulation change and temperature-related metrics.
Fig. 4: Schematic illustration of possible forced mechanisms for the tropical Pacific changes in the zonal SST contrast and associated trade winds.

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Acknowledgements

We thank F.-F. **, A. Fedorov and M. Yoshimori for comments on this work; R. Wills, J. Ying, Y. Dong, N. Burls, A. Capotondi and other members of the CLIVAR-CFMIP working group on the tropical Pacific SST warming patterns (TROPICS) for suggestions and discussion; and H. Kim and D. Lee for help producing Fig. 3. M.W. was supported by the Program for Advanced Studies of Climate Change Projection (SENTAN) Grant-in-Aid JPMXD0722680395 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and JSPS Kakenhi grant number 24H00261, Japan. M.C. was supported by Natural Environment Research Council NE/W005239/1. Y.-T.H. was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (NSTC 112-2111-M-002-016-MY4). S.M. was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant numbers FT160100162 and DP200102329) and the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program (NESP2). M.F.S. was supported by NSF grant AGS-2141728. This is IPRC publication 1619 and SOEST contribution 11795. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan

    Masahiro Watanabe

  2. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

    Sarah M. Kang

  3. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Matthew Collins

  4. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Yen-Ting Hwang

  5. School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Shayne McGregor

  6. Department of Oceanography & International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Malte F. Stuecker

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  4. Yen-Ting Hwang
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M.W. and S.M.K. initially designed and structured the paper. M.C., Y.-T.H., S.M. and M.F.S. equally contributed to the writing with S.M.K. and M.W.

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Watanabe, M., Kang, S.M., Collins, M. et al. Possible shift in controls of the tropical Pacific surface warming pattern. Nature 630, 315–324 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07452-7

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