Klanteng Blog: 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.