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USGS · 70185082

North Pacific decadal climate variability since 1661

Franco Biondi·Alexander Gershunov·Daniel R. Cayan
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Abstract

Climate in the North Pacific and North American sectors has experienced interdecadal shifts during the twentieth century. A network of recently developed tree-ring chronologies for Southern and Baja California extends the instrumental record and reveals decadal-scale variability back to 1661. The Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) is closely matched by the dominant mode of tree-ring variability that provides a preliminary view of multiannual climate fluctuations spanning the past four centuries. The reconstructed PDO index features a prominent bidecadal oscillation, whose amplitude weakened in the late l700s to mid-1800s. A comparison with proxy records of ENSO suggests that the greatest decadal-scale oscillations in Pacific climate between 1706 and 1977 occurred around 1750, 1905, and 1947.

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Franco Biondi, Alexander Gershunov, Daniel R. Cayan. 2001. North Pacific decadal climate variability since 1661. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(2001)014%253c0005%3Anpdcvs%253e2.0.co%3B2

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