New generation of climate models sheds first light on long-standing Pacific puzzle

Researchers have long been puzzled by the observed cooling of the eastern tropical Pacific and the Southern Ocean accompanying global warming. Existing climate models have failed to capture this pattern. At the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, researchers have come a significant step closer to the answer: Using a new generation of more physical climate models, they have demonstrated the first successful representation of the observed trend in a climate simulation and have delivered an explanation of the underlying mechanisms.