Monday April 7, 2025
PhysOrg —
As global temperatures warm, the Southern Ocean—between Antarctica and other continents—will eventually release heat absorbed from the atmosphere, leading to projected long-term increases in precipitation over East Asia and the Western U.S., regardless of climate mitigation efforts.
These teleconnections between the tropical Pacific and far-flung areas are reported in a Cornell University-led computer-model study published in Nature Geoscience.
While other computer models have projected similar precipitation increases generated by a warming Southern Ocean, major uncertainties and a wide range of predictions exist between models.
The new study serves to reduce those uncertainties, which could improve predictions of global mean temperatures and regional precipitation.
“We needed to find the cause of those uncertainties,” said Hanjun Kim, the study’s co-corresponding author and a postdoctoral associate working with co-authors Flavio Lehner and Angeline Pendergrass, both assistant professors of atmospheric sciences at Cornell. Sarah Kang, professor in the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, is the paper’s other corresponding author.