COMPASS 2024-10-18: Abhishek Savita, Rosenstiel School
"Impact of Multidecadal Climate Modes' Variability on the European Climate in the Recent Decades"
Pronounced negative trends in wintertime surface temperature have been observed over Eurasia during 1993-2013. However, it is unclear whether the negative trends were due to internal atmospheric variability or forced externally from either the ocean surface, solar forcing, or atmospheric composition. In this study, we use ensembles of atmosphere-model integrations for the period 1993-2013 to investigate the mechanisms of the wintertime cooling over Eurasia. We find that the cooling was mostly driven by intrinsic atmospheric variability, specifically the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and to a lesser extent by multidecadal ocean variability such as the Interdecadal Pacific Variability (IPV) and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV). A dominant role for atmospheric variability as shown by our results implies limited predictability of decadal climate variability over Eurasia.