The Cold Ocean–Warm Land Pattern: Model Simulation and Relevance to Climate Change Detection

Abstract

Abstract Surface air temperatures from a 1000-yr integration of a coupled atmosphere–ocean model with constant forcing are analyzed by using a method that decomposes temperature variations into a component associated with a characteristic spatial structure and a residual. The structure function obtained from the coupled model output is almost identical to the so-called cold ocean–warm land (COWL) pattern based on observations, in which above-average spatial mean temperature is associated with anomalously cold oceans and anomalously warm land. This pattern features maxima over the high-latitude interiors of Eurasia and North America. The temperature fluctuations at the two continental centers exhibit almost no temporal correlation with each other. The temperature variations at the individual centers are related to teleconnection patterns in sea level pressure and 500-mb height that are similar to those identified in previous observational and modeling studies. As in observations, variations in the polarity...