The natural climate fluctuations of the Pacific Ocean have a significant impact on surface temperatures in many regions of the world. Climate change predictions require more comprehensive data to account for these natural variations. Recent temperature measurements show that the Earth is getting warmer, with human-made CO2 emissions being the primary cause of climate change. However, these effects are often overlaid by natural climate fluctuations, making accurate climate predictions challenging. Scientists at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel have discovered that climate fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean significantly influence the global climate over several decades.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, explains that strong natural climate fluctuations exist in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Current predictions of future climate development within the next few decades have a relatively large range of uncertainty. Therefore, the researchers aimed to find the relationship between natural climate fluctuations in the Pacific and global climate development. They developed a study that simulated three different scenarios of climate development, assuming rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and varying natural climate fluctuations in the Pacific. The results showed that a significant portion of the uncertainty in climate predictions originates from this region.
According to the scientists, detailed information about the state of the oceans could significantly improve climate change predictions. Changes in surface temperatures in many regions of the world depend heavily on the initial state of the Pacific, as explained by co-author Prof. Dr. Mojib Latif. However, the researchers currently have insufficient information to include natural climate fluctuations in climate predictions. Therefore, in addition to the models used for forecasting, more observation data is necessary.
