Pacific North American circulation pattern links external forcing and North American hydroclimatic change over the past millennium

Edited by Mark H. Thiemens, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, and approved February 14, 2017 (received for review November 2, 2016)
March 13, 2017
114 (13) 3340-3345

Significance

We have developed a new reconstruction of changes in the wintertime atmospheric circulation over North America based on data distributed across the region. The record spans almost 1,000 years and shows how variation in ocean temperatures, solar energy, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gases has affected circulation over this period. We show that the circulation pattern is strongly correlated with fluctuating drought conditions in the western United States. Climate models do a poor job of simulating the reconstructed record of circulation change, and thus may have difficulty predicting future patterns of drought influenced by changing winter storm tracks across this region.

Abstract

Land and sea surface temperatures, precipitation, and storm tracks in North America and the North Pacific are controlled to a large degree by atmospheric variability associated with the Pacific North American (PNA) pattern. The modern instrumental record indicates a trend toward a positive PNA phase in recent decades, which has led to accelerated warming and snowpack decline in northwestern North America. The brevity of the instrumental record, however, limits our understanding of long-term PNA variability and its directional or cyclic patterns. Here we develop a 937-y-long reconstruction of the winter PNA based on a network of annually resolved tree-ring proxy records across North America. The reconstruction is consistent with previous regional records in suggesting that the recent persistent positive PNA pattern is unprecedented over the past millennium, but documents patterns of decadal-scale variability that contrast with previous reconstructions. Our reconstruction shows that PNA has been strongly and consistently correlated with sea surface temperature variation, solar irradiance, and volcanic forcing over the period of record, and played a significant role in translating these forcings into decadal-to-multidecadal hydroclimate variability over North America. Climate model ensembles show limited power to predict multidecadal variation in PNA over the period of our record, raising questions about their potential to project future hydroclimatic change modulated by this circulation pattern.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Xiaogang He for his help with tree-ring data collection and Haimao Lan for assistance with model data processing. We also thank Bradford Hubeny and Tracy Ewen for providing access to reconstructed PNA data. We acknowledge the International Tree-Ring Data Bank and the CMIP5/PMIP3 communities for making available proxy data and model outputs. This work was supported by the China Young 1000-Talent Program and National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant 41171022 (to Z.L.) and National Science Foundation Award EF-1241286 (to G.J.B.).

Supporting Information

Appendix (PDF)

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Information & Authors

Information

Published in

The cover image for PNAS Vol.114; No.13
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Vol. 114 | No. 13
March 28, 2017
PubMed: 28289226

Classifications

Submission history

Published online: March 13, 2017
Published in issue: March 28, 2017

Keywords

  1. paleoclimate
  2. atmospheric circulation
  3. Holocene
  4. climate change
  5. North America

Acknowledgments

We thank Xiaogang He for his help with tree-ring data collection and Haimao Lan for assistance with model data processing. We also thank Bradford Hubeny and Tracy Ewen for providing access to reconstructed PNA data. We acknowledge the International Tree-Ring Data Bank and the CMIP5/PMIP3 communities for making available proxy data and model outputs. This work was supported by the China Young 1000-Talent Program and National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant 41171022 (to Z.L.) and National Science Foundation Award EF-1241286 (to G.J.B.).

Notes

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

Authors

Affiliations

Zhongfang Liu1 [email protected]
State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China;
Yanlin Tang
School of Mathematical Sciences, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China;
Zhimin Jian
State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China;
Christopher J. Poulsen
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109;
Jeffrey M. Welker
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK 99508;
Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112;
Global Change and Sustainability Center, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Notes

1
To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected] or [email protected].
Author contributions: Z.L. and G.J.B. designed research; Z.L., C.J.P., and G.J.B. performed research; Z.L. and Y.T. analyzed data; and Z.L., Z.J., C.J.P., J.M.W., and G.J.B. wrote the paper.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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    Pacific North American circulation pattern links external forcing and North American hydroclimatic change over the past millennium
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
    • Vol. 114
    • No. 13
    • pp. 3265-E2799

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