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Climate Dynamics

, Volume 32, Issue 2–3, pp 189–203 | Cite as

Detection of external influence on trends of atmospheric storminess and northern oceans wave heights

  • Xiaolan L. WangEmail author
  • Val R. Swail
  • Francis W. Zwiers
  • Xuebin Zhang
  • Yang Feng
Article
First Online:

Abstract

The atmospheric storminess as inferred from geostrophic wind energy and ocean wave heights have increased in boreal winter over the past half century in the high-latitudes of the northern hemisphere (especially the northeast North Atlantic), and have decreased in more southerly northern latitudes. This study shows that these trend patterns contain a detectable response to anthropogenic and natural forcing combined. The effect of external influence is found to be strongest in the winter hemisphere, that is, in the northern hemisphere in January–March and in the southern hemisphere in July–September. However, the simulated response to anthropogenic and natural forcing combined, which was obtained directly from climate models in the case of geostrophic wind energy and indirectly via an empirical downscaling procedure in the case of ocean wave heights, is significantly weaker than the magnitude of the observed changes in these parameters.

Keywords

Atmospheric storminess Ocean wave heights Climate extremes Non-stationary generalized extreme value analysis Trend analysis Natural and anthropogenic forcing Detection analysis Climate change 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Dr. Jiafeng Wang for his help in compiling the climate model outputs, to Dr. Tara Ansell and Dr. Nathan P. Gillett for their help in answering our questions about the HadSLP2 data, and to Dr. Myles Allen for his help in originating the idea of a detection work on ocean wave heights. The authors also wish to thank Dr. Seung-Ki Min and Dr. Bin Yu for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  • Xiaolan L. Wang
    • 1
    Email author
  • Val R. Swail
    • 1
  • Francis W. Zwiers
    • 1
  • Xuebin Zhang
    • 1
  • Yang Feng
    • 1
  1. 1.Climate Research Division, Atmospheric Science and Technology Directorate, STBEnvironment CanadaTorontoCanada

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