The Impact of Volcanic Eruption on Decadal-Scale Climate Prediction Skill of Pacic Sea Surface Temperatures in the IAP Near-Term Climate Prediction System (IAP DecPreS)
Explosive volcanic eruptions are known to be a leading cause of natural climate change. There has been a growing recognition that there is a measurable climate system response even to moderate-sized volcanic eruptions. In this study, we investigated the hindcast skills of the Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) using the hindcast experiments based on the near-term climate prediction system DecPreS developed by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) (hereafter DP-EnOI-IAU experiments). The DP-EnOI-IAU experiments were run for initial years from 1960 to 2005. These hindcasts took into account observed stratospheric aerosol concentrations that included the four large tropical volcanic eruptions during that period. The time evolution over the entire hindcast period for skill in predicting the patterns of the 3 ~7 year prediction averages for Pacific SSTs showed that there was statistically significant skill for most years except for a dramatic drop in skill during the 1980s and 1990s. Decadal hindcast skill is reduced if the post-eruption model response deviates the internal El Nino variability in the observations. The simulations showed a post-eruption SST of a La Nina-like pattern in the third northern winter after the 1982 El Chichon eruption and a El Nino-like pattern after the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, which were opposite in sign to what was in the observations. This lead to the loss of hindcast skill for years in the 1980s and 1990s affected by the eruptions. Agung (1963) happened to have post-eruption Pacific SSTs more similar to the observations and thus did not degrade prediction skill in the hindcasts.