A special issue on a “Unified Perspective of Climate Variability and Change” was published by Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (AAS) in February 2016, presenting the latest research on developing dynamical approaches that bridge climate variability and change. Scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP)/Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Ocean University of China, University of California San Diego, University of Tokyo, the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology/CAS, and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology contributed to the Special Issue.

The cover of the Special Issue. On the cover shows the potential vorticity advected by an ocean eddy on a constant-density surface in the North Pacific mode water formation region. The cover is produced based on an ocean model simulation and inspired by Hokusai's Japanese ukiyo-e "The Great Wave off Kanagawa". 

The Special Issue consists of a review paper on the Understanding of Indo-Northwest Pacific Climate Variability (Xie et al., 2016), and nine original research articles. It addresses many of the burning issues in climate change research, and attracted both media and academic attention as soon as the articles were posted via Early Online Release. The review, led by Professor Shang-Ping XIE from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, has been downloaded nearly 3000 times within two months of being posted as Early Online Release. 

Screenshot showing the number of downloads and hits for Xie et al. (2016) from the AAS website.  

The paper by Wang et al. (2016) from IAP on sea-level rise in Macau, also included in the special issue, immediately attracted considerable media coverage.

Media coverage of Wang et al. (2016): Screenshots from the websites of the South China Morning Post (left) and Science Daily (right).  

In addition, the Special Issue includes a commentary entitled “The Fingerprint of Global Warming in the Tropical Pacific” by the world renowned climate scientist, Noel Keenlyside (Keenlyside and Dommenget, 2016), on Ying et al (2016), one of the papers included in the issue. Dr. KEENLYSIDE states that the research by Ying et al.(2016) from IAP “…makes an important contribution towards addressing the first part of this question for the Tropical Pacific and provides a framework for addressing the second part.”

As for the significance of the Special Issue, Professor XIE, who organized the special issue, observed in the preface:  

"We live in a special historic epoch when anthropogenic change has grown with comparable magnitude to internal variability. It is also a golden age of scientific discoveries, as global warming continues to grow and regional patterns of the resultant climate change emerge from internal variability. Science advances when confronted by new observations, when challenged by emerging contradictions, and when called upon to predict.”  

References 

Keenlyside, N. and D. Dommenget, 2016: The fingerprint of global warming in the Tropical Pacific. Adv. in Atmos. Sci., 33(4), doi: 10.1007/s00376-016-6014-1.  

Wang, L., H. Huang, W. Zhou, W. Chen. Historical Change and Future Scenarios of Sea Level Rise in Macau and Adjacent Waters. Adv. Atmos. Sci., 2016, 33(4): 462-475, doi: 10.1007/s00376-015-5047-1.

Xie, S.-P., Y. Kosaka, Y. Du, K. Hu, J. Chowdary, and G. Huang, 2016: Indo-western Pacific ocean capacitor and coherent climate anomalies in post-ENSO summer: A review. Adv. Atmos. Sci., 33(4), doi: 10.1007/s00376-015-5192-6.

Ying, J., P. Huang, and R. H. Huang, 2016: Evaluating the formation mechanisms of the equatorial Pacific SST warming pattern in CMIP5 Models. Adv. Atmos. Sci., 33(4), doi: 10.1007/s00376-015-5184-6.  

Contact: AAS Editorial Office, aas@mail.iap.ac.cn