Contribution of SST change to multidecadal global and continental surface air temperature trends between 1910 and 2013

Abstract

The global mean surface air temperature (GMST) shows multidecadal variability over the period of 1910–2013, with an increasing trend. This study quantifies the contribution of hemispheric surface air temperature (SAT) variations and individual ocean sea surface temperature (SST) changes to the GMST multidecadal variability for 1910–2013. At the hemispheric scale, both the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) observations and the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Community Atmosphere Model 5.3 (CAM5.3) simulation indicate that the Northern Hemisphere (NH) favors the GMST multidecadal trend during periods of accelerated warming (1910–1945, 1975–1998) and cooling (1940–1975, 2001–2013), whereas the Southern Hemisphere (SH) slows the intensity of both warming and cooling processes. The contribution of the NH SAT variation to the GMST multidecadal trend is higher than that of the SH. We conduct six experiments with different ocean SST forcing, and find that all the oceans make positive contributions to the GMST multidecadal trend during rapid warming periods. However, only the Indian, North Atlantic, and western Pacific oceans make positive contributions to the GMST multidecadal trend between 1940 and 1975, whereas only the tropical Pacific and the North Pacific SSTs contribute to the GMST multidecadal trend between 2001 and 2013. The North Atlantic and western Pacific oceans have important impacts on modulating the GMST multidecadal trend across the entire 20th century. Each ocean makes different contributions to the SAT multidecadal trend of different continents during different periods.