Ensemble experiments with a global coupled climate model are performed for the twentieth century with time-evolving solar, greenhouse gas, sulfate aerosol (direct effect), and ozone (tropospheric and stratospheric) forcing. Observed global warming in the twentieth century occurred in two periods, one in the early twentieth century from about the early 1900s to the 1940s, and one later in the century from, roughly, the late 1960s to the end of the century. The model's response requires the combination of solar and anthropogenic forcing to approximate the early twentieth-century warming, while the radiative forcing from increasing greenhouse gases is dominant for the response in the late twentieth century, confirming previous studies. Of particular interest here is the model's amplification of solar forcing when this acts in combination with anthropogenic forcing. This difference is traced to the fact that solar forcing is more spatially heterogeneous (i.e., acting most strongly in areas where sunlight reaches the surface) while greenhouse gas forcing is more spatially uniform. Consequently, solar forcing is subject to coupled regional feedbacks involving the combination of temperature gradients, circulation regimes, and clouds. The magnitude of these feedbacks depends on the climate's base state. Over relatively cloud-free oceanic regions in the subtropics, the enhanced solar forcing produces greater evaporation. More moisture then converges into the precipitation convergence zones, intensifying the regional monsoon and Hadley and Walker circulations, causing cloud reductions over the subtropical ocean regions, and, hence, more solar input. An additional response to solar forcing in northern summer is an enhancement of the meridional temperature gradients due to greater solar forcing over land regions that contribute to stronger West African and South Asian monsoons. Since the greenhouse gases are more spatially uniform, such regional circulation feedbacks are not as strong. These regional responses are most evident when the solar forcing occurs in concert with increased greenhouse gas forcing. The net effect of enhanced solar forcing in the early twentieth century is to produce larger solar-induced increases of tropical precipitation when calculated as a residual than for early century solar-only forcing, even though the size of the imposed solar forcing is the same. As a consequence, overall precipitation increases in the early twentieth century in the Asian monsoon regions are greater than late century increases, qualitatively consistent with observed trends in all-India rainfall. Similar effects occur in West Africa, the tropical Pacific, and the Southern Ocean tropical convergence zones.
The misorientation of three-component seismometers restricts the application of relevant seismic experiments such as ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) arrays. Previous orientation determination relied on an assumption that the propagation azimuth of seismic waves follows the great-circle path (GCP) azimuth. This assumption may yield systematic errors in the estimated orientation, particularly when the ray paths are bent laterally due to velocity heterogeneity in the Earth. Here, we develop a new method for unbiasedly estimating the horizontal orientations of seismic sensors and apply this method to the Blanco transform fault OBS experiment. We first retrieve the orientations relative to the propagation azimuths from the recorded Rayleigh and P waveforms, and then determine the geographic north orientations by calculating the propagation azimuths via an Eikonal-equation-based phase-tracking method that theoretically accounts for the effect of ray bending. Synthetics test validates that the phase-tracking method can retrieve unbiased propagation azimuths of seismic waves. The final results derived from Rayleigh- and P-wave polarization analyses with the respective phase-tracked propagation azimuths are more consistent and the orientation errors are smaller, indicating the robustness and accuracy of this method. Comparing the orientations from our phase-tracking method to those from the GCP assumption, the deviation can reach up to 8° between these two techniques in the study region. Subsequently, when orientations of the synthetics modeled from three-dimensional elastic waveform simulation are deviated according to the GCP-predicted orientations, we find nonnegligible bias in the phase and amplitude measurements that could reduce the accuracy and resolution of following inversion, which indicates the significance of our phase-tracking method in accurate orientation of OBS arrays as well as inland seismic experiments.
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