The Boreal Summer Zonal Wavenumber-3 Trend Pattern and Its Connection with Surface Enhanced Warming

Abstract

Abstract The Northern Hemisphere warms faster under global warming and suffers from more frequent heatwaves, causing considerable social and economic damage. The Northern Hemisphere surface warming exhibits strong regionality, with multiple “hotspots” (areas of enhanced warming), but the relations among them remain unclear. This study finds a dominating zonal wavenumber-3 (ZW3) trend pattern in the upper-level geopotential heights during the boreal summer. The summer geopotential heights show significant increasing trends along the latitudinal circle around 60°N, with three centers located over northeastern America, western Eurasia, and eastern Siberia. The regionally enhanced surface warming trends are closely linked to the increased geopotential through the reduced cloud cover, exhibiting a consistent ZW3 pattern. The model simulations forced by sea surface temperature (SST) and Arctic sea ice cover (SIC) indicate that the SST forcing plays an important role in generating the ZW3 pattern, while the contribution of the SIC is minimal. A theoretical barotropic model can fairly well reproduce the observed ZW3 structure forced by a heating source located over the subtropical North Atlantic, where the SSTs show prominent warming trends and a close relationship with the ZW3 pattern. Our results indicate that the hotspots may be interconnected and are related to a Rossby wave train with a ZW3 structure. It highlights a vital role of tropical/subtropical SSTs on the atmospheric circulation and the associated surface enhanced warming over the mid- to high latitudes, which may have great implications for the coordinated heatwave events and tropical–extratropical teleconnections.