Detection and attribution of abrupt climate changes in the last one hundred years
Zhang Wen(张文)a)b)† and Wan Shi-Quan(万仕全)c)d)
a Tongda College, Nanjing University of Post and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China; b Key Laboratory of Regional Climate{Environment Research for Temperate East Asia, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China; cLaboratory for Climate Studies of China Meteorological Administration, National Climate Center, Beijing 100081, China; dYangzhou Meterorological O±ce, Yangzhou 225000, China
Abstract Based on physical backgrounds, the four time series of the Guliya (Tibetan plateau) ice core (GIC) $\delta^{18}$O, and three natural factors, i.e. the rotation rate of earth, sunspots, and El Nino--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signals, are decomposed into two hierarchies, i.e. more and less than 10-year hierarchies respectively, and then the running $t$-test is used to reanalyse the data before and after filtering with the purpose of investigating the contribution of natural factors to the abrupt climate changes in the last one hundred years. The results show that the GIC $\delta^{18}$O evolved with a quasi-period of 7--9 years, and the abrupt climate changes in the early 1960s and in the period from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s resulted from the joint effect of the two hierarchies, in other words, the two interdecadal abrupt changes of climate in the last one hundred years were global. The interannual variations of ENSO and sunspots were the important triggering factors for the abrupt climate changes in the last one hundred years. At the same time, the method of Information Transfer (IT) is employed to estimate the contributions of ENSO signals and sunspots activities to the abrupt climate changes, and it is found that the contribution of the interannual variation of ENSO signals is relatively large.
Received: 15 October 2007
Revised: 29 December 2007
Accepted manuscript online:
Fund: Project supported by the National
Natural Sciences Foundation of China (Grant No 40675044) and the
State Key Development Program
for Basic Research (Grant No 2006CB400503).
Cite this article:
Zhang Wen(张文) and Wan Shi-Quan(万仕全) Detection and attribution of abrupt climate changes in the last one hundred years 2008 Chin. Phys. B 17 2311
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