Identifying the causes of the poor decadal climate prediction skill over the North Pacific

Abstract

While the North Pacific region has a strong influence on North American and Asian climate, it is also the area with the worst performance in several state‐of‐the‐art decadal climate predictions in terms of correlation and root mean square error scores. The failure to represent two major warm sea surface temperature events occurring around 1963 and 1968 largely contributes to this poor skill. The magnitude of these events competes with the largest observed temperature anomalies in the twenty‐first century that might be associated with the long‐term warming. Understanding the causes of these major warm events is thus of primary concern to improve prediction of North Pacific, North American and Asian climate. The 1963 warm event stemmed from the propagation of a warm ocean heat content anomaly along the Kuroshio‐Oyashio extension. The 1968 warm event originated from the upward transfer of a warm water mass centered at 200 m depth. For being associated with long‐lived ocean heat content anomalies, we expect those events to be, at least partially, predictable. Biases in ocean mixing processes present in many climate prediction models seem to explain the inability to predict these two major events. Such currently unpredictable warm events, if occurring again in the next decade, would substantially enhance the effect of long‐term warming in the region.