Temperature trend patterns in Southern Hemisphere high latitudes: Novel indicators of stratospheric change

Abstract

Robust stratospheric temperature trend patterns are suggested in the winter and spring seasons in the Southern Hemisphere high latitudes from the satellite-borne Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) measurement for 1979-2007. These patterns serve as indicators of key processes governing temperature and ozone changes in the Antarctic. The observed patterns are characterized by cooling and warming regions of comparable magnitudes, with the strongest local trends occurring in September and October. In September, ozone depletion induces radiative cooling, and strengthening of the Brewer-Dobson circulation (BDC) induces dynamical warming. Because the trends induced by these two processes are centered in different locations in September, they do not cancel each other, but rather produce a wavelike structure. In contrast, during October, the ozone-induced radiative cooling and the BDC-induced warming exhibit a more zonally symmetric structure than in September, and hence largely cancel each other. However, the October quasi-stationary planetary wavenumber 1 has shifted eastward from 1979 to 2007, producing a zonal wavenumber-1 trend structure, which dominates the observed temperature trend pattern. Simulated temperature changes for 1979-2007 from coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) experiments run for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC AR4) are compared with the observations. In general, the simulated temperature changes are dominated by zonally symmetric ozone-induced radiative cooling. The models fail to simulate the warming in the southern polar stratosphere, implying a lack of the BDC strengthening in these models. They also fail to simulate the quasi-stationary planetary wave changes observed in October and November. © 2009 American Meteorological Society.