Abstract
Climate response to low warming scenarios that meet 2015 Paris Agreement is distinct from that to the medium/high-emissions scenarios analyzed in previous studies. The present study investigates changes in the North Pacific subtropical gyre and the underlying mechanisms under 1.5 °C low warming scenario by 11-member ensemble simulations from the Community Earth System Model. Specifically, atmospheric CO2 concentration peaks in 2036 and then decreases, with global mean surface temperature (GMST) first increasing and then stabilizing after 2045. The changes of the lower thermocline depth are consistently weaker in the subtropics than in the tropics or high latitudes through 2100. During GMST increasing stage, the subtropical circulation strengthens in the upper 1000 m north of 30° N as a result of the enhanced wind stress. When GMST stabilizes, the subtropical circulation strengthens in the surface layer (0–150 m) and the main thermocline (150–600 m) but displays insignificant change in the intermediate layer (600–1000 m). Wind and stratification changes are both important in driving the North Pacific subtropical gyre changes, because sea surface warming is much weaker in the low warming scenario than that in the medium/high-emissions scenarios. In addition, as the surface wind change displays substantial natural variability and is strongly model-dependent, it dominates the differences in projected subtropical circulation changes across models. This study highlights the importance of wind changes in projections of the subtropical circulation changes under low warming scenarios.
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Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We acknowledge the CESM low warming scenario from the National Center for Atmospheric Research model community and WCRP Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model outputs. The cross-calibrated multiplatform (CCMP) ocean surface wind product used in our analyses are obtained from the Scientific Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The CESM outputs are available on https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/dataset/ucar.cgd.ccsm4.lowwarming.html. All outputs from the CMIP5 are available on https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/esgf-llnl/l. The CCMP datasets are available on http://data.remss.com/ccmp/v02.0/. This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (41525019, 41706026, 41830538, 41831175, 41506019), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA15020901, 133244KYSB20190031, ZDRW-XH-2019-2), the State Oceanic Administration of China (GASI-IPOVAI-02), “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (2018B04814, 2017B20714), and the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (GML2019ZD0303, 2019BT2H594).
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Ju, WS., Long, SM., Xie, SP. et al. Changes in the North Pacific subtropical gyre under 1.5 °C low warming scenario. Clim Dyn 55, 3117–3131 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05436-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05436-7