Abstract
Climate variability exists at all timescales—and climatic processes are intimately coupled, so that understanding variability at any one timescale requires some understanding of the whole. Records of the Earth's surface temperature illustrate this interdependence, having a continuum of variability following a power-law scaling1,2,3,4,5,6,7. But although specific modes of interannual variability are relatively well understood8,9, the general controls on continuum variability are uncertain and usually described as purely stochastic processes10,11,12,13. Here we show that power-law relationships of surface temperature variability scale with annual and Milankovitch-period (23,000- and 41,000-year) cycles. The annual cycle corresponds to scaling at monthly to decadal periods, while millennial and longer periods are tied to the Milankovitch cycles. Thus the annual, Milankovitch and continuum temperature variability together represent the response to deterministic insolation forcing. The identification of a deterministic control on the continuum provides insight into the mechanisms governing interannual and longer-period climate variability.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 51 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.90 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Shackleton, N. J. & Imbrie, J. The δ18O spectrum of oceanic deep water over a five-decade band. Clim. Change 16, 217–230 (1990)
Ditlevsen, P., Svensmark, H. & Johnsen, S. Contrasting atmospheric and climate dynamics of the last-glacial and Holocene periods. Nature 379, 810–812 (1996)
Pelletier, J. The power-spectral density of atmospheric temperature from time scales of 10-2 to 106 yr. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 158, 157–164 (1998)
Fraedrich, K. & Blender, R. Scaling of atmosphere and ocean temperature correlations in observations and climate models. Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 108501 (2003)
Blender, R. & Fraedrich, K. Long time memory in global warming simulations. Geophys. Res. Lett. 14, doi:10.1029/2003GL017666 (2003)
Schmitt, F., Lovejoy, S. & Schertzer, D. Multifractal analysis of the Greenland Ice-core Project climate data. Geophys. Res. Lett. 22, 1689–1692 (1995)
Ashkenazy, Y., Baker, D., Gildor, H. & Havlin, S. Nonlinearity and multifractality of climate change in the past 420,000 years. Geophys. Res. Lett. 30, doi:10.1029/2003GL018099 (2003)
Philander, G. El Niño, La Niña, and the Southern Oscillation (Academic, San Diego, California, 1990)
Hurrell, J. & Van Loon, H. Decadal variations in climate associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation. Clim. Change 36, 301–326 (1997)
Kominz, M. & Pisias, N. Pleistocene climate—deterministic or stochastic? Science 204, 171–173 (1979)
Pelletier, J. Coherence resonance and ice ages. J. Geophys. Res. 108, doi:10.1029/2002JD003120 (2003)
Wunsch, C. The spectral description of climate change including the 100 ky energy. Clim. Dyn. 20, 353–363 (2003)
Fraedrich, K., Luksch, U. & Blender, R. A 1/f-model for long time memory of the ocean surface temperature. Phys. Rev. E 70, 037301 (2003)
Hays, J., Imbrie, J. & Shackleton, N. Variations in the earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the ice ages. Science 194, 1121–1132 (1976)
Imbrie, J. et al. On the structure and origin of major glaciation cycles. 1. Linear responses to Milankovitch forcing. Paleoceanography 6, 205–226 (1992)
Wunsch, C. The spectrum from two years to two minutes of temperature fluctuations in the main thermocline at Bermuda. Deep-Sea Res. 19, 577–593 (1972)
Garrett, C. & Munk, W. Internal waves in the ocean. Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 80, 291–297 (1979)
Percival, D. & Walden, A. Spectral Analysis for Physical Applications (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK, 1993)
Kalnay, E. et al. The NCEP/NCAR 40-year reanalysis project. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 77, 437–471 (1996)
DeWitt, D. G. & Schneider, E. K. The processes determining the annual cycle of equatorial sea surface temperature: A coupled general circulation model perspective. Mon. Weath. Rev. 127, 381–395 (1999)
Jones, P., New, M., Parker, D., Martin, S. & Rigor, I. Surface air temperature and its variations over the last 150 years. Rev. Geophys. 37, 173–199 (1999)
Elgar, S. & Sebert, G. Statistics of bicoherence and biphase. J. Geophys. Res. 94, 10993–10998 (1989)
Hasselmann, K. Stochastic climate models. Part I. Theory. Tellus 6, 473–485 (1976)
Serreze, M. C. et al. Observational evidence of recent change in the northern high-latitude environment. Clim. Change 46, 159–207 (2000)
Delworth, T. L. et al. Review of simulations of climate variability and change with the GFDL R30 coupled climate model. J. Clim. 19, 555–574 (2002)
McCoy, E., Walden, A. & Percival, D. Multitaper spectral estimation of power law processes. IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 46, 655–668 (1998)
Wilson, K., Francis, D., Wensel, R., Coats, A. & Parker, K. Relationship between detrended fluctuation analysis and spectral analysis of heart-rate variability. Physiol. Meas. 23, 385–401 (2002)
Briffa, K. et al. Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree-ring density network. J. Geophys. Res. 106, 2929–2941 (2001)
Wunsch, C. & Gunn, D. A densely sampled core and climate variable aliasing. Geo-mar. Lett. 29, doi:10.1007/s00367-003-0125-2 (2003)
Huybers, P. & Wunsch, C. A depth-derived Pleistocene age-model: Uncertainty estimates, sedimentation variability, and nonlinear climate change. Paleoceanography 19, doi:10.1029/2002PA000857 (2004)
Acknowledgements
P.H. was supported by the NOAA Postdoctoral Program in Climate and Global Change. Funding for W.C. was provided by the National Science Foundation, Division of Ocean Sciences. T. Crowley, R. Ferrari, O. Marchal, J. Sachs, D. Steele and C. Wunsch provided useful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
Reprints and permissions information is available at npg.nature.com/reprintsandpermissions. The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Notes
This file contains Supplementary Table, Supplementary Figures 1 and 2 and additional references. (PDF 699 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Huybers, P., Curry, W. Links between annual, Milankovitch and continuum temperature variability. Nature 441, 329–332 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04745
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04745
This article is cited by
-
Noble gas evidence of a millennial-scale deep North Pacific palaeo-barometric anomaly
Nature Geoscience (2024)
-
The climate variability trio: stochastic fluctuations, El Niño, and the seasonal cycle
Geoscience Letters (2023)
-
A joint framework for studying compound ecoclimatic events
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2023)
-
A pseudoproxy emulation of the PAGES 2k database using a hierarchy of proxy system models
Scientific Data (2023)
-
Forced changes in the Pacific Walker circulation over the past millennium
Nature (2023)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.