Stadium wave

The stadium wave hypothesis, proposed by climate scientists Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry, posits that multidecadal climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere is not a collection of independent oscillations but a propagating signal — a sequential activation of climate indices that moves through the coupled ocean-ice-atmosphere system like a wave passing through a stadium crowd. The hypothesis suggests that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, the Arctic Oscillation, and the Pacific decadal oscillation are not separate phenomena but coupled phases of a single, slow-moving climate signal. Critics argue that the stadium wave lacks a clear physical mechanism and may be an artifact of statistical methods applied to short climate records, while proponents see it as evidence of a propagating climate signal that unifies apparently disparate modes of variability.