Origins of Simulated Decadal Variability in the Southern Ocean Region

• Main Authors: X. Qu, J. Boé, A. Hall
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Southern Ocean; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.390.198; http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/csrl/publications/Hall/Qu_et_al_2008.pdf

Pre-industrial control experiments of 15 climate models are used to examine decadal variability in the surface climate of Southern Hemisphere extratropics. We find the climate over the Southern Ocean exhibits large decadal variability in all simulations, underscoring the distinctiveness of this region’s internal variability. In every model, decadal variations in surface temperature and sea-ice are closely linked, possibly due to sea-ice albedo feedback. These similarities aside, we find there is two- to three-fold intermodel spread in the magnitude of the decadal variability. We apply linear stochastic theory to ‘model the models’, and find that it almost perfectly captures the models’ behavior. This exercise also reveals that most of the intermodel spread