Dominant wintertime surface air temperature modes in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics

Abstract

Recent observations showed that boreal winter exhibits significant cooling events in the Eurasian and North American continents despite the global warming trend. To better understand the boreal winter surface air temperature (SAT) variability and its physical characteristics, we investigated the three distinct Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) modes of the extratropical 2-m air temperature (T2m) variation and found that each mode can be related to the well-known physical processes: The first mode is characterized by the coherent change of wintertime SAT anomalies over northern Eurasia and central-eastern North America and it is found that snow cover variation in the Eurasian region can modulate Arctic Oscillation (AO) circulation through the troposphere–stratosphere interaction, which can affect wintertime SAT in the two continents. The second leading mode shows warm anomalies over the North Pacific especially around the Bering Strait and cold anomalies over most of Canada and the central part of North America. Associated with this mode, La Nina-like sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly can modulate the North American SAT variability through the generation of the tropospheric Pacific–North American (PNA) teleconnection pattern. The third mode represents warm anomalies over the Barents and Kara (B–K) seas and cold anomalies over East Asia. Sea ice loss over the B–K sea is analyzed to be closely related to the SAT variability over the East Asian region.