A regime view of the North Atlantic Oscillation and its response to anthropogenic forcing

Woollings, T., Hannachi, A., Hoskins, B. and Turner, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0642-6876 (2010) A regime view of the North Atlantic Oscillation and its response to anthropogenic forcing. Journal of Climate, 23 (6). pp. 1291-1307. ISSN 1520-0442 doi: 10.1175/2009JCLI3087.1

Abstract/Summary

The distribution of the daily wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index in the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40) is significantly negatively skewed. Dynamical and statistical analyses both suggest that this skewness reflects the presence of two distinct regimes—referred to as “Greenland blocking” and “subpolar jet.” Changes in both the relative occurrence and in the structure of the regimes are shown to contribute to the long-term NAO trend over the ERA-40 period. This is contrasted with the simulation of the NAO in 100-yr control and doubled CO2 integrations of the third climate configuration of the Met Office Unified Model (HadCM3). The model has clear deficiencies in its simulation of the NAO in the control run, so its predictions of future behavior must be treated with caution. However, the subpolar jet regime does become more dominant under anthropogenic forcing and, while this change is small it is clearly statistically significant and does represent a real change in the nature of NAO variability in the model.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/8174
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > NCAS
Uncontrolled Keywords	North Atlantic Oscillation, Anthropogenic effects, Forcing, Trends, Statistical techniques
Publisher	American Meteorological Society
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