Tropospheric Mean Temperature and Its Relationship to the Oceans and Atmospheric Aerosols

Abstract

Multiple-regression analyses of changes in tropospheric mean temperature as predictands and Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures and atmospheric aerosol concentrations as predictors show that large fractions of the variances of the tropical, Northern Hemispheric and Southern Hemispheric extratropical tropospheric temperatures may be explained by fluctuations in ocean surface temperatures and atmospheric aerosols. The sensitivity of the tropical, Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere extratropical tropospheric temperatures to the various predictors are estimated. To improve the precision of the estimates in the presence of serial correlations in the variables we used a generalized least-squares procedure to obtain the regression models.