The long-term spatiotemporal variability of sea surface temperature in the northwest Pacific and China offshore

Abstract

Abstract. The variability of the sea surface temperature (SST) in the northwest Pacific has been studied on seasonal, annual and interannual scales based on the monthly datasets of extended reconstructed sea surface temperature (ERSST) 3b (1854–2017, 164 years) and optimum interpolation sea surface temperature version 2 (OISST V2 (1988–2017, 30 years). The overall trends, spatial–temporal distribution characteristics, regional differences in seasonal trends and seasonal differences of SST in the northwest Pacific have been calculated over the past 164 years based on these datasets. In the past 164 years, the SST in the northwest Pacific has been increasing linearly year by year, with a trend of 0.033 ∘C/10 years. The SST during the period from 1870 to 1910 is slowly decreasing and staying in the range between 25.2 and 26.0 ∘C. During the period of 1910–1930, the SST as a whole maintained a low value, which is at the minimum of 164 years. After 1930, SST continued to increase until now. The increasing trend in the past 30 years has reached 0.132 ∘C/10 years, and the increasing trend in the past 10 years is 0.306 ∘C/10 years, which is around 10 times that of the past 164 years. The SST in most regions of the northwest Pacific showed a linear increasing trend year by year, and the increasing trend in the offshore region was stronger than that in the ocean and deep-sea region. The change in trend of the SST in the northwest Pacific shows a large seasonal difference, and the increasing trend in autumn and winter is larger than that in spring and summer. There are some correlations between the SST and some climate indices and atmospheric parameters; the correlations between the SST and some atmospheric parameters have been discussed, such as those of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) anomaly, total column water (TCW), NINO3.4 index, sea level pressure (SLP), precipitation, temperature at 2 m (T2) and wind speed. The lowest SST in China offshore basically occurred in February and the highest in August. The SST fluctuation in the Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea (BYS) is the largest, with a range from 5 to 22 ∘C; the SST in the East China Sea (ECS) is from 18 to 27 ∘C; the smallest fluctuations occur in the South China Sea (SCS), maintained at range of 26 to 29 ∘C. There are large differences between the mean and standard deviation in different sea regions.