Abstract The decadal trend behavior of the Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation is investigated utilizing long-term simulations with different state-of-the-art coupled general circulation models (GCMs) for present-day climate conditions (1990), reconstructions of the past 500 yr, and observations. The multimodel simulations show that strong positive winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) trends are connected with the underlying sea surface temperature (SST) and exhibit an SST tripole trend pattern and a northward shift of the storm-track tail. Strong negative winter trends of the Aleutian low are associated with SST changes in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) region and a westward shift of the storm track in the North Pacific. The observed simultaneous appearance of strong positive NAO and negative Aleutian low trends is very unlikely to occur by chance in the unforced simulations and reconstructions. The positive winter NAO trend of the last 50 yr is not statistically different from the level of internal atmosphere–ocean variability. The unforced simulations also show a strong link between positive SST trends in the ENSO region and negative Aleutian low trends. With much larger observed SST trends in the ENSO region, this suggests that the observed negative Aleutian low trend is possibly influenced by external forcing, for example, global warming, volcanism, and/or solar activity change.