Climate change alters teleconnections
Abstract
Internal modes of climate variability, such as El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation, can have strong influences upon distant weather patterns, effects that are referred to as "teleconnections". The extent to which anthropogenic climate change has and will continue to affect these teleconnections, however, remains uncertain. Here, we employ a covariance fingerprinting approach to demonstrate that shifts in teleconnection patterns affecting monthly temperatures between the periods 1960-1990 and 1990-2020 are attributable to anthropogenic forcing. We further apply multilinear regression to assess the regional contributions and statistical significance of changes in five key climate modes: the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Southern Annular Mode, Indian Ocean Dipole, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. In many regions, observed changes exceed what would be expected from natural variability alone, further implicating an anthropogenic influence. Finally, we provide projections of how these teleconnections will alter in response to further changes in climate.
Read the paper
Related studies
- Climate Change Impacts on Marine Ecosystems
- Assisted Gene Flow to Facilitate Local Adaptation to Climate Change
- Climate Change Effects on Plant Disease: Genomes to Ecosystems
- Biodiversity and Climate Change: Integrating Evolutionary and Ecological Responses of Species and Communities
- A systematic review of climate change education: giving children and young people a ‘voice’ and a ‘hand’ in redressing climate change
- Global Monsoon Dynamics and Climate Change
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.