Data from: The Relationship between the Southern Ocean and the Eastern tropical Pacific in unforced and forced climate model simulations

The sea surface temperature (SST) over the eastern tropical Pacific
significantly influences global-mean climate feedback and may be driven in
part by the SST over the Southern Ocean. Previous studies demonstrated a
teleconnection from the Southern Ocean to the eastern tropical Pacific by
perturbing the Southern Ocean climate. We investigate if this
teleconnection holds in a fully coupled, freely running climate system
using CMIP6 models. We assess the relationship between the Southern Ocean
(SO) and the eastern tropical Pacific (SEP) by calculating correlations
between SO and SEP SST timeseries within each model and regressions
between mean SO and SEP SSTs across models. We show robust, positive
SO-SEP relationships in an unforced climate using pre-industrial SSTs, in
a forced climate using SST anomalies between pre-industrial and quadrupled
CO2 simulations, and in the SST pattern of the forced response relative to
the global-mean SST anomaly. The strength of SO-SEP correlations is
positively related to the stratocumulus cloud feedback off the west coast
of South America, and negatively related to ocean heat uptake in the same
region. As both shortwave cloud feedback and ocean heat uptake are
underestimated in climate models, understanding their effects on SO-SEP
teleconnections and their interactions is crucial for determining the
strength of SO-SEP teleconnection in the real world and its
trustworthiness in climate model projection.