Separating the dynamical effects of climate change and ozone depletion. Part II: Southern Hemisphere troposphere

• Published in: Journal of Climate
• Main Authors: McLandress, Charles, Shepherd, Theodore G., Scinocca, John F., Plummer, David A., Sigmond, Michael, Jonsson, Andreas I., Reader, M. Catherine
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Meteorological Society 2011
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/28443/; https://doi.org/10.1175/2010JCLI3958.1

The separate effects of ozone depleting substances (ODSs) and greenhouse gases (GHGs) on forcing circulation changes in the Southern Hemisphere extratropical troposphere are investigated using a version of the Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model (CMAM) that is coupled to an ocean. Circulation-related diagnostics include zonal wind, tropopause pressure, Hadley cell width, jet location, annular mode index, precipitation, wave drag, and eddy fluxes of momentum and heat. As expected, the tropospheric response to the ODS forcing occurs primarily in austral summer, with past (1960-99) and future (2000-99) trends of opposite sign, while the GHG forcing produces more seasonally uniform trends with the same sign in the past and future. In summer the ODS forcing dominates past trends in all diagnostics, while the two forcings contribute nearly equally but oppositely to future trends. The ODS forcing produces a past surface temperature response consisting of cooling over eastern Antarctica, and is the dominant driver of past summertime surface temperature changes when the model is constrained by observed sea surface temperatures. For all diagnostics, the response to the ODS and GHG forcings is additive: that is, the linear trend computed from the simulations using the combined forcings equals (within statistical uncertainty) the sum of the linear trends from the simulations using the two separate forcings. Space time spectra of eddy fluxes and the spatial distribution of transient wave drag are examined to assess the viability of several recently proposed mechanisms for the observed poleward shift in the tropospheric jet.