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Could CMIP6 climate models reproduce the early-2000s global warming slowdown?

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Abstract

The unexpected global warming slowdown during 1998–2013 challenges the existing scientific understanding of global temperature change mechanisms, and thus the simulation and prediction ability of state-of-the-art climate models since most models participating in phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) cannot simulate it. Here, we examine whether the new-generation climate models in CMIP6 can reproduce the recent global warming slowdown, and further evaluate their capacities for simulating key-scale natural variabilities which are the most likely causes of the slowdown. The results show that although the CMIP6 models present some encouraging improvements when compared with CMIP5, most of them still fail to reproduce the warming slowdown. They considerably overestimate the warming rate observed in 1998–2013, exhibiting an obvious warming acceleration rather than the observed deceleration. This is probably associated with their deficiencies in simulating the distinct temperature change signals from the human-induced long-term warming trend and or the three crucial natural variabilities at interannual, interdecadal, and multidecadal scales. In contrast, the 4 models that can successfully reproduce the slowdown show relatively high skills in simulating the long-term warming trend and the three key-scale natural variabilities. Our work may provide important insight for the simulation and prediction of near-term climate changes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all the data providers. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41806043), the Basic Scientific Fund for National Public Research Institutes of China (Grant No. 2019Q08), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41821004), the Basic Scientific Fund for National Public Research Institute of China (Shu Xingbei Young Talent Program Grant No. 2019S06), the National Program on Global Change and Air-Sea Interaction (Grant No. GASI-IPOVAI-06), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41906029).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. First Institute of Oceanography, and Key Laboratory of Marine Science and Numerical Modeling, Ministry of Natural Resources, Qingdao, 266061, China

    Meng Wei, Qi Shu, Zhenya Song, Yajuan Song, Xiaodan Yang, Xinfang Li & Fangli Qiao

  2. Laboratory for Regional Oceanography and Numerical Modeling, Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266237, China

    Meng Wei, Qi Shu, Zhenya Song, Yajuan Song, Xiaodan Yang, Xinfang Li & Fangli Qiao

  3. Shandong Key Laboratory of Marine Science and Numerical Modeling, Qingdao, 266061, China

    Meng Wei, Qi Shu, Zhenya Song, Yajuan Song, Xiaodan Yang, Xinfang Li & Fangli Qiao

  4. Marine Science and Technology College, Zhejiang Ocean University, Zhoushan, 316000, China

    Yongqing Guo

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  1. Meng Wei
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Correspondence to Fangli Qiao.

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Wei, M., Shu, Q., Song, Z. et al. Could CMIP6 climate models reproduce the early-2000s global warming slowdown?. Sci. China Earth Sci. 64, 853–865 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-020-9740-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-020-9740-3

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