A central tropical Pacific coral demonstrates Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic decadal climate connections

Abstract

While instrumental and proxy‐based climate records describe significant decadal‐scale climate variability throughout the tropical Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, the processes responsible for these variations and their interactions are not readily apparent from the observations. A new 112‐yr coral‐based sea surface temperature (SST) reconstruction from Palmyra Island in the central tropical Pacific (CTP) exhibits strong decadal variability with an amplitude of roughly 0.3°C. A 12–13yr‐period signal in this coral record is highly coherent with long equatorial Atlantic and Indian Ocean climate records, implying a unified phenomenon. The Atlantic pattern suggests that it may fall under direct influence of anomalous SST in the CTP, as it does over inter annual timescales, while the Indian Ocean pattern exhibits maximum response during the switch between warm/cold states in the tropical Pacific. The results demonstrate that the CTP has played a significant role in determining the expression of global decadal climate variability over the twentieth century.