Despite the increase in greenhouse gases, the average global temperature has plateaued over the last 15 years. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego have found that cooling in the eastern Pacific Ocean has slowed down earth’s warming, and they hope to use these new findings to better understand and predict regional and global climate patterns.

Dan Barrie, program manager at NOAA, called the research “compelling” and said: “[It] provides a powerful illustration of how the remote eastern tropical Pacific guides the behavior of the global ocean-atmosphere system, in this case exhibiting a discernible influence on the recent hiatus in global warming.”

The tropical Pacific Ocean is responsible for many of earth’s weather patterns, most notably El Nino and La Nina, which can shift the global average temperatures as much as 0.3 degree Celsius. Another less well-known weather pattern is known as Pacific decadal oscillation, in which the ocean experiences a cool or warm cycle lasting a few decades.

The Earth experienced a cool cycle in the tropical Pacific from the 1940s to the 1970s, before swinging back into a warm state from the 1970s to the 1990s. The Pacific decadal oscillation has since moved back to the cool cycle, which experts believe should be ending soon, along with its halting global warming.

Scripps climate scientists Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie had a notion these long-term weather patterns contributed to global climate change. They used models to reproduce the short and long-term trends based on global climate records from the past century. They plugged in observed sea-surface temperatures along with more traditional numbers for the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases into the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory computer model of the oceans and atmosphere to determine whether the cooler tropical Pacific was in fact halting climate change. The researchers successfully reproduced the recent pause in global warming. They were also able to mimic as well as weather phenomena such as the prolonged drought in the southern United States.

The cool cycle will end and kick start the global warming once again; however, scientists are still unable to predict when that shift will occur. “That speaks to the challenge in predicting climate for the next few years,” said Xie. “We don’t know precisely when we’re going to come out of [the hiatus] but we know that over the timescale of several decades, climate will continue to warm as we pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”