Temporal Variations of Dipole Teleconnections in the Southern Oceans and Their Climatic Impacts

Abstract:

Dipole behavior in ocean-atmosphere variability has been subject to extensive study due to their impacts on regional climates, such as that of the Indian Ocean Dipole. This study uses the results of a combined correlation coefficient and empirical orthogonal function analysis to study sea surface temperature anomaly dipoles with inter-annual periodicity, and explore seasonal variability. Previous work has shown that this dipole behavior has remained stable for at least the last century [Reischmann et al., 2014. Previous work has also shown that polar climate dipoles display a clear transfer function on a millennial scale for the last 80,000 years [Oh et al., 2014]. This transfer function has been rigorously tested, demonstrating the usefulness of the method of spectral deconvolution for linearly related climate systems. Here we present different time scales of dipole behavior, their impacts on local climates, and discuss what methods of connection can allow them to remain sustained on a centennial or millennial scale. Multiple climate proxies are necessary to study these time scales and their impacts, from weekly satellite observations which have been extended to a centennial scale via multiple models, to annual or multi-annual lake sediment and dendrochronology records with larger sampling rates and absolute dating uncertainty. Analysis techniques such as spectral deconvolution will make use of the linear nature of these dipole connections to study the energy transfer functions and their physical implications. The longest scale results of this study may be compared to the work establishing the synchronized nature of the polar climates on the millennial scale.