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Monday, June 15, 2009

Putting The Short-Term Trend Of North Atlantic SST Anomalies Into Perspective

I’ve moved to WordPress.  This post can now be found at Putting The Short-Term Trend Of North Atlantic SST Anomalies Into Perspective
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The following quote is from my post “The Impact of the North Atlantic and Volcanic Aerosols on Short-Term Global SST Trends”:
“The disparity between the North Atlantic SST anomaly trend…and the rest of the subsets was striking. The North Atlantic SST anomaly linear trend for the period of November 1981 (the start of the OI.v2 SST dataset) and January 2009 is ~0.264 deg C/decade, while the global linear trend is ~0.0948 deg C/decade. The North Atlantic linear trend is approximately 2.8 times the global linear trend, driven by Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and El Ninos, (yes, El Ninos).”

Figure 1 illustrates that disparity. It shows the linear trends for the North Atlantic and the other ocean subsets that I normally include in the monthly SST anomaly updates. Even though North Atlantic SST anomalies have plummeted in the past four months, the difference in the trends is still substantial.
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Figure 1

And to reinforce the relative importance of the North Atlantic on the global SST anomaly linear trend since 1979, refer again the my post “The Impact of the North Atlantic and Volcanic Aerosols on Short-Term Global SST Trends”. It showed that by removing the (naturally elevated) North Atlantic SST anomalies, the global SST anomalies dropped from ~0.095 deg C/decade to ~0.055 deg C/decade. And by removing the impacts of the eruptions of El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo, the global SST anomaly linear trend is further reduced to ~0.037 deg C/decade. Refer to Figure 2.
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Figure 2

LINEAR TRENDS PER OCEAN

The linear trends illustrated in Figure 1 were created from the time-series graphs of the individual ocean SST anomaly graphs that follow.
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Figure 3
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Figure 4
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Figure 5
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Figure 6
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Figure 7
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Figure 8
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Figure 9
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SOURCE

OI.v2 SST Anomaly data is available through the NOAA NOMADS system:http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite

4 comments:

Knut Witberg said...

Are there results confirmed by Argo? Or are the Argo results weighted in at the end?

Bob Tisdale said...

Knut: The paper on the OI.v2 SST data is here:
ftp://ftp.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/cmb/sst/papers/oiv2pap/oiv2.pdf

It uses satellite and in situ (ship and buoy) measurements, but they don’t specifically cite ARGO when discussing buoys.

Andrew said...

What is the reason for the sudden up spike in the arctic ocean data toward the end?

It reminds me of the behavior of sea ice, and I am sort of wondering how you can measure SST under ice...Do they simply take sea ice as a proxy for temperature.

Bob Tisdale said...

Andrew, the spike in the Arctic SST anomalies occurred in 2007, the year of the drastic reduction in sea ice. And the majority of the SST anomaly occurred in the Arctic Ocean North of Siberia and Alaska, where in anomalous ice reduction was found.

Regards

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