Climate History of the North Pacific into the 19th Century

The meteorology and oceanography of the northern North Pacific was recently dominated by a multi-year warm event (2000-2005) followed by a multi-year cold event (2007-2010) with many monthly anomalies exceeding plus/minus 4.0° C. The only multi-year temperature event comparable to the first decade of the 2000s in the 100 year meteorological record are a cold event in 1971–1976 followed by a warm event in 1978–1983. While there are theoretical arguments for some physical memory processes in the North Pacific climate system, we cannot rule out that the recent warm and cold events are of a random nature:  they are rare in the temperature record, they are dominated by North Pacific-wide sea level pressure events rather than local processes, and they are consistent with a red noise model of climate variability. We emphasizes the importance of these sub-decadal events with rapid beginning and ending transitions for the North Pacific and discount the importance of multi-decadal patterns of variability often associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) that has dominated much of the scientific literature in recent years. Evidence provided by the meteorological record reinforces the idea that a red-noise model of climate variability is appropriate for the northern North Pacific and southeastern Bering Sea. Thus, in the past and the future we can expect large positive and negative climatic excursions in the region that can last for multiple years, but there is little regularity (oscillations) or predictability for their timing and duration.