Articles | Volume 19, issue 9
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6351-2019
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6351-2019
Research article
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15 May 2019
Research article | Highlight paper |  | 15 May 2019

Northern Hemisphere continental winter warming following the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption: reconciling models and observations

Lorenzo M. Polvani, Antara Banerjee, and Anja Schmidt

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Cited articles

Barnes, J. E. and Hofmann, D. J.: Lidar measurements of stratospheric aerosol over Mauna Loa Observatory, Geophys. Res. Lett., 24, 1923–1926, 1997. a
Bittner, M.: On the discrepancy between observed and simulated dynamical responses of Northern Hemisphere winter climate to large tropical volcanic eruptions, Ph.D. thesis, Univerisity of Hamburg, Reports on Earth System Science, no. 173, 2015. a, b, c, d
Bittner, M., Schmidt, H., Timmreck, C., and Sienz, F.: Using a large ensemble of simulations to assess the Northern Hemisphere stratospheric dynamical response to tropical volcanic eruptions and its uncertainty, Geophys. Res. Lett., 43, 9324–9332, 2016. a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i
Bluth, G. J., Doiron, S. D., Schnetzler, C. C., Krueger, A. J., and Walter, L. S.: Global tracking of the SO2 clouds from the June, 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruptions, Geophys. Res. Lett., 19, 151–154, 1992. a
Brönnimann, S.: Impact of El Niño–Southern Oscillation on European climate, Rev. Geophys., 45, 1–28, 2007. a
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Short summary
This study provides compelling new evidence that the surface winter warming observed over the Northern Hemisphere continents following the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo was, very likely, completely unrelated to the eruption. This result has implications for earlier eruptions, as the evidence presented here demonstrates that the surface signal of even the very largest known eruptions may be swamped by the internal variability at high latitudes.
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