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Revisiting the equatorial Pacific sea surface temperature response to global warming

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Abstract

The relative roles of the oceanic and atmospheric processes in the pattern formation of the equatorial Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) response to global warming is investigated using a set of climate model experiments embedded with a novel partial coupling technique. The modeling results show that the SST response experiences a transition from a La Niña-like warming pattern at the initial stage to an El Niño-like warming pattern at the quasi-equilibrium stage. By decomposing anomalous equatorial Pacific SST into atmosphere thermally forced passive component and ocean dynamically induced active component, it is found that the SST warming pattern at both stages is entirely induced by its active component. Specifically, the meridional and vertical ocean circulation changes play a dominant role in forming the La Niña-like SST warming pattern at the initial stage, and the zonal and meridional ocean circulation changes are responsible for the formation of the El Niño-like SST warming pattern at the quasi-equilibrium stage. In contrast, the passive SST at both stages is characterized by a zonally uniform warming along the equator, which can be explained by a balance between the total effect of the heat transport divergence associated with the mean ocean circulation and the effect of the passive surface heat flux change. In addition, this study finds that it is the slowdown of the Pacific subtropical cells during the transition period that controls the evolution of the equatorial SST warming pattern by changing the meridional and vertical ocean heat transports.

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Data availability

The CESM data used in this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped improve the manuscript. We also acknowledge Dr. Oluwayemi Garuba for sharing the data of the fully and partially coupled experiments with tracers. This work is supported by the Laoshan Laboratory (No. LSKJ202202401) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC; 42230405 and 41976006). This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC award ERCAP0017151. JL is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research as part of the Regional and Global Model Analysis program area. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.

Funding

This work is supported by the Laoshan Laboratory (No. LSKJ202202401) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC; 42230405 and 41976006). This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC award ERCAP0017151. JL is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research as part of the Regional and Global Model Analysis program area. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Frontier Science Center for Deep Ocean Multispheres and Earth System (FDOMES) and Physical Oceanography Laboratory, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

    Qiuxian Li, Yiyong Luo & Fukai Liu

  2. College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

    Qiuxian Li, Yiyong Luo & Fukai Liu

  3. Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Jian Lu

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  1. Qiuxian Li
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YL, JL and FL were responsible for design of the research. The first draft of the manuscript was written by QL and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yiyong Luo.

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Appendix: Validation of tracer approach

Appendix: Validation of tracer approach

Two passive tracers mimicking ocean temperature are employed to separate the surface-forced and dynamically induced anomalous ocean temperature components in both the FULL and PARTIAL experiments. To validate the tracer approaches, we compare the results from the tracers with the actual temperature anomalies. The result shows that the sum of the surface-forced and dynamically induced components obtained by the two tracer approaches, agrees well with the total temperature anomaly in both FULL and PARTIAL, validating the effectiveness of the tracer approaches in decomposing the ocean temperature response (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12
figure 12

Changes of SST (°C) in a the total response and b the sum of surface-forced and dynamically induced components in FULL. c, d Are same as a and b but for the PARTIAL. A mean of the last 50 years of each simulation is used for analysis. The resemblance between the sum of tracers and the actual SST response supports the validity of the tracer approach

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Li, Q., Luo, Y., Lu, J. et al. Revisiting the equatorial Pacific sea surface temperature response to global warming. Clim Dyn 62, 2239–2258 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-07019-8

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