Influence of variations in extratropical wintertime teleconnections on northern hemisphere temperature

Abstract

Pronounced changes in the wintertime atmospheric circulation have occurred since the mid‐1970s over the ocean basins of the Northern Hemisphere, and these changes have had a profound effect on surface temperatures. The variations over the North Atlantic are related to changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), while the changes over the North Pacific are linked to the tropics and involve variations in the Aleutian low with teleconnections downstream over North America. Multivariate linear regression is used to show that nearly all of the cooling in the northwest Atlantic and the warming across Europe and downstream over Eurasia since the mid‐1970s results from the changes in the NAO, and the NAO accounts for 31% of the hemispheric interannual variance over the past 60 winters. Over the Pacific basin and North America, the temperature anomalies result in part from tropical forcing associated with the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation phenomenon but with important feedbacks in the extratropics. The changes in circulation over the past two decades have resulted in a surface temperature anomaly pattern of warmth over the continents and coolness over the oceans. This pattern of temperature change has amplified the observed hemispheric‐averaged warming because of its interaction with land and ocean; temperature changes are larger over land compared to the oceans because of the small heat capacity of the former.