Hindcast

Climatology

Coupled model intercomparison project

Climate model

Geology

Oceanography

Paleontology

Global warming

Climate change

Pacific decadal oscillation

Hiatus

Environmental science

El Niño Southern Oscillation

Nature Climate Change

Accounting for natural decadal variability allows better prediction of short-term trends. This study looks at the ability of individual models, which are in phase with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, to simulate the current global warming slowdown. The authors highlight that the current trend could have been predicted in the 1990s with this technique and the need for consistent hindcast skills to allow reliable decadal predictions. The slowdown in the rate of global warming in the early 2000s is not evident in the multi-model ensemble average of traditional climate change projection simulations1. However, a number of individual ensemble members from that set of models successfully simulate the early-2000s hiatus when naturally-occurring climate variability involving the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) coincided, by chance, with the observed negative phase of the IPO that contributed to the early-2000s hiatus. If the recent methodology of initialized decadal climate prediction could have been applied in the mid-1990s using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 multi-models, both the negative phase of the IPO in the early 2000s as well as the hiatus could have been simulated, with the multi-model average performing better than most of the individual models. The loss of predictive skill for six initial years before the mid-1990s points to the need for consistent hindcast skill to establish reliability of an operational decadal climate prediction system.

Climate model simulations of the observed early-2000s hiatus of global warming