Southern Hemisphere climate response to ozone changes and greenhouse gas increases

Abstract

While most of the Earth warmed rapidly during recent decades, surface temperatures decreased significantly over most of Antarctica. This cooling is consistent with circulation changes associated with a shift in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). It has been suggested that both Antarctic ozone depletion and increasing greenhouses gases have contributed to these trends. We show that a climate model including the stratosphere and both composition changes reproduces the vertical structure and seasonality of observed trends. We find that the two factors have had comparable surface impacts over recent decades, though ozone dominates above the middle troposphere. Projected impacts of the two factors on circulation over the next fifty years oppose one another, resulting in minimal trends. In contrast, their effects on surface climate reinforce one another, causing a departure from the SAM pattern and a turnabout in Antarctic temperatures, which rise more rapidly than elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.