Temporal Variability in the Expression of the Arctic Oscillation in the North Pacific

Abstract

Abstract Although the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) have been identified as important modes of climate variability during the Northern Hemisphere (NH) winter, whether the AO or the NAO is more fundamental to the description of this variability, especially in the North Pacific, is still an open question. An important contributor to this uncertainty is the lack of knowledge of the low-frequency linkages between the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans. This paper explores the linkage between the two oceanic basins on interdecadal time scales using the sea level pressure (SLP) field during the twentieth century. In particular, it is shown that the winter mean SLP in the North Pacific was positively correlated with the sign of the NAO during the periods of 1925–50 and 1980–98, which resulted in the classical AO pattern being the dominant mode in the NH. In contrast, during the period of 1951–79, the winter mean SLP in the two basins was decoupled, resulting in a dominant mode that more closely resembled the NAO. Using paleoclimate reconstructions, it is also shown that this interdecadal variability in the North Pacific climate began around 1850, which is nominally considered to be the end of the Little Ice Age.