Abstract
Decadal variability in the ocean is an important indicator of climate system shifts and has considerable influences on marine ecosystems. We investigate the responses of decadal variability over the global ocean regions using nine CMIP6 models (BCC-CSM2-MR, CESM2-WACCM, CMCC-ESM2, EC-Earth3-Veg-LR, FGOAL-f3-L, INM-CM5-0, MIROC6, MPI-ESM1-2-LR, and NorESM2-MM). Our results show that climate models can capture the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Tropical Pacific Decadal Variability, South Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability under present-day conditions. The ocean decadal variabilities are becoming weaker and their periods are decreasing, especially under the strong global warming scenario. However, there is a discrepancy between the Tropical Pacific Decadal Variability and the other three modes of climate variability. This might be caused by the nearly unchanged atmospheric forcing in the equatorial region, which is decreasing in the higher latitude regions.
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1 Introduction
In recent years, ocean decadal variability has attracted ever-increasing attention for its importance in modulating global warming (England et al. 2014; Bordbar et al. 2017). In its sixth assessment report (AR6), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) clearly affirmed the significant contribution of human activity to the warming of the atmosphere, oceans, and land by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions since the Industrial Revolution (Li 2022; Thapliyal et al. 2023). However, the increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) is not linear but instead has two alternating phases, which include accelerated warming and a global warming hiatus (IPCC, 2013). GMST increased rapidly during 1920–1945 and 1977–2000 but stalled during 1946–1976 and 2001–2013 (England et al. 2014, 2015; Bordbar et al. 2019). The common view is that greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols dominate long-term warming trends, while natural internal variability determines the climate system phase shift (Farneti 2017). By conducting the pacemaker experiments, it was suggested that the global warming hiatus may be caused by the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV) (Kosaka and ** rate (Wu and Liu 2020). This result is established in the mid-high latitudes, and the tropical atmosphere forcing seems to change little under global warming (Fig. S15e–h). The shortened period is caused by the acceleration of ocean Rossby waves (Fang et al. 2014) which is also different in the equatorial regions.
Overall, under global warming, the shortening and weakening of the decadal variabilities are both robust across the global regions in CMIP6 models. And the shortening of periods is also established in the CESM large ensemble with longer data length (180 years) (Fig. S16). However, the TPDV has a weaker response which might be related to the tropical atmospheric forcing. And the pattern of the decadal variabilities will not change in the future, which suggests the dynamical process may not change under global warming. However, the expression outside the chosen regions of each decadal variability is weakened in the future scenarios (Figs. S1–4), which could be related to the change of teleconnection between different regions or the industrial aerosols or greenhouse gases forcing signal in decadal variabilities indices (Baek et al. 2022). In this study, we provide an overview of the responses of global ocean decadal variability in the future. Further studies are needed to verify these results by using longer data and understanding the mechanism in different regions.
Data availability
The ERSST dataset is downloaded from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/extended-reconstructed-sst. The CMIP6 dataset is downloaded from https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/. The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 42105043, and Chinese MOST (2017YFA0603801). The analyses are performed on the Marine Big Data Center of Institute for Advanced Ocean Study of Ocean University of China and High-performance Computing Platform of Peking University. This work is also supported by Postdoctoral Innovation Project of Shandong Province.
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Shang, Y., Liu, P. & Wu, S. Responses of the Pacific and Atlantic decadal variabilities under global warming by using CMIP6 models. Ocean Dynamics 74, 67–75 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-023-01590-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-023-01590-8