Evaluation of Northern Hemisphere natural climate variability in multiple temperature reconstructions and global climate model simulations

Abstract

The detection of anthropogenic climate change in observations and the validation of climate models both rely on understanding natural climate variability. To evaluate internal climate variability, we apply spectral analysis to time series of surface air temperature (SAT) from nine coupled general circulation model (GCM) simulations, three recent global paleotemperature reconstructions, and Northern Hemisphere (NH) instrumental records. Our comparison is focused on the NH due to the greater spatial and temporal coverage and validation of the available NH temperature reconstructions. The paleotemperature reconstructions capture the general magnitude of NH climate variability, but not the precise variance and specific spatial, temporal, or periodic signals demonstrated in the instrumental record. The models achieved varying degrees of success for each measure of variability analyzed, with none of the models consistently capturing the appropriate variability. In general, the models performed best in the analysis of combined mean annual land and marine variability.