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Monday, January 18, 2010

Flattening (For The Most Part) Ocean Basin Linear Trends

I’ve moved to WordPress.  This post can now be found at Flattening (For The Most Part) Ocean Basin Linear Trends
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The linear trends of the Global Combined and Sea Surface Temperatures have flattened in recent years. For those interested in which of the five major ocean basins--Indian, North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific--has flattened the most, which is actually showing an increase, and which are now showing negative trends over the past decade, I’ve prepared the following three spaghetti graphs. The linear trends, Figures 1 though 3, were determined by EXCEL for the following three periods:
Figure 1 – November 1981 to December 2009 (from the start of the OI.v2 SST dataset)
Figure 2 – January 1995 to December 2009 (the past 15 years)
Figure 3 – January 2000 to December 2009 (the past 10 years)

The decadal trends and the coordinates used for the ocean basins are listed in Table 1.
http://i50.tinypic.com/iddpvd.png
Figure 1 – November 1981 to December 2009
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http://i48.tinypic.com/33fetlz.png
Figure 2 – January 1995 to December 2009
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http://i46.tinypic.com/11j8xu1.png
Figure 3 – January 2000 to December 2009
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http://i49.tinypic.com/11kzd4y.png
Table 1

SOURCE

The Optimally Interpolated Sea Surface Temperature Data (OISST) are available through the NOAA National Operational Model Archive & Distribution System (NOMADS).
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite

2 comments:

Bill Illis said...

Thanks Bob, like the material as always.

So you know I've posted before about the AMO (and you've posted about it more recently).

The North Atlantic is the only ocean area which has warmed recently (give-or-take).

A simple regression on global temperatures and the AMO indicates that it has more impact on (the cyclical nature of) temperatures than even the ENSO does.

But this could also just be a spurious correlation. Global temperatures go up, the AMO then goes up as a feed-back/result of the warming.

Or, as I have assumed, the cyclical AMO is itself a significant driver of temperatures, rather than a feedback or result.

Looking for an honest answer here. Which came first? A driver or a result or a coincidence? Is the ENSO really the driver of the AMO? I'm not sure it can really be answered but what do you think?

Bob Tisdale said...

Bill Illis: The AMO and ENSO should provide feedback to one another. I look at them as two separate but interrelated processes, with the AMO a function of AMOC/THC and with ENSO a function of coupled ocean-atmosphere processes in the equatorial Pacific.

We know that ENSO impacts SSTs in the North Atlantic...
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/02/there-are-also-el-nino-induced-step.html
...and we know that an El Nino can slow AMOC as shown in Fig 6 here...
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/11/atlantic-meridional-overturning.html

Wang et al (2009) discussed teleconnections from the tropical Atlantic to the tropical Pacific:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/docs/Wang_etal_2009.pdf

And someone recently left a link to a paper that discussed a multidecadal lag between ENSO and the AMO or vice versa, but I can't find the paper in my files.

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