Tentative reconstruction of the 1998–2012 hiatus in global temperature warming using the IPSL–CM5A–LR climate model

Overview & Synopsis

The period running from 1998 to 2012 has experienced a slower increase in global temperature at the surface of the Earth than the decades before. Several explanations have been proposed, ranging from internal variability of the climate system to a contribution of the natural external forcing. In this study, we use the IPSL-CM5A-LR climate model to test these different hypotheses. We consider historical simulations, including observed external forcing, in which nudging towards observed sea surface temperature has been applied to different regions of the ocean to phase the decadal variability of large-scale modes in the Atlantic and the Pacific to observations. We find that phasing the tropical Pacific is reducing the warming trend detected in historical simulations by a factor of two, but the remaining trend is still twice as large as the observed one. Combining the tropical Pacific phasing and the potential effect of recent eruptions allows us to fully reproduce the observed hiatus. Conversely, nudging the Atlantic does not drive any hiatus in this model.