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Published Online August 11, 2005
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1114867

Reports

Submitted on May 16, 2005
Accepted on July 27, 2005

Amplification of Surface Temperature Trends and Variability in the Tropical Atmosphere

Benjamin D. Santer 1*, Tom M. L. Wigley 2, Carl Mears 3, Frank J. Wentz 3, Stephen A. Klein 1, Dian J. Seidel 4, Karl E. Taylor 1, Peter W. Thorne 5, Michael F. Wehner 6, Peter J. Gleckler 1, Jim S. Boyle 1, W. D. Collins 2, Keith W. Dixon 7, Charles Doutriaux 1, Melissa Free 4, Qiang Fu 8, Jim E. Hansen 9, Gareth. S. Jones 10, Reto Ruedy 9, T. R. Karl 11, John R. Lanzante 7, Gerald A. Meehl 2, V. Ramaswamy 7, Gary Russell 9, Gavin A. Schmidt 9

1 Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550, USA.
2 National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80303, USA.
3 Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, USA.
4 NOAA/Air Resources Laboratory, Silver Spring, MD 20910, USA.
5 Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, U.K. Met. Office, Exeter, EX1 3PB, UK.
6 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
7 NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA.
8 Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
9 NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY 10025, USA.
10 Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, U.K. Met. Office, Exeter, EX1 3PB, UK. 6Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
11 NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, NC 28801, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Benjamin D. Santer , E-mail: santer1{at}llnl.gov

The month-to-month variability of tropical temperatures is larger in the troposphere than at the Earth's surface. This amplification behavior is similar in a range of observations and climate model simulations, and is consistent with basic theory. On multi-decadal timescales, tropospheric amplification of surface warming is a robust feature of model simulations, but occurs in only one observational dataset. Other observations show weak or even negative amplification. These results suggest that either different physical mechanisms control amplification processes on monthly and decadal timescales, and models fail to capture such behavior, or (more plausibly) that residual errors in several observational datasets used here affect their representation of long-term trends.


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