On the role of external forcing for the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (original) (raw)

Abstract

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is an important mode of variability in the Atlantic region with impacts on the regional to hemispheric scale and links to various phenomena from Sahel drought to tropical hurricane frequencies. Whether the AMO is a persistent oscillatory phenomenon or to some some extent driven by external forcings is still under debate. In the last years this question was assessed in a number of reconstruction and modeling studies. In general, two different approaches are applied: (1) methods which focus on the internal variability by decomposing the data into externally forced variations and a residuum (i.e. the AMO) and (2) methods which use the original data including the external signal. The former has the disadvantage that an attribution of AMO variations to external forcing is per definition no longer possible and the characteristics of the residuum may depend on the decomposition method. For this study, we compare both methods and analyze the role ...

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