Dominant sea-surface temperature anomaly patterns in summer over the North Pacific ocean

摘要

We investigated the structure and persistency of the dominant sea-surface temperature (SST) anomaly pattern in summer over the North Pacific from 1960 to 2004, which has been attracting less attention than those in winter. The leading empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) for August and September, which can be treated as the summer patterns, rather resemble each other in both spatial structure and time variations but are quite different from those of the other months. A lag correlation analysis indicates that the summer patterns do not show significant persistency in the following winter and the summer of the next year. An inappropriate definition of the summer season might obscure the characteristics of the dominant summer SST anomaly pattern in the North Pacific.