scholarly journals On the Role of the Eastern Pacific Teleconnection in ENSO Impacts on Wintertime Weather over East Asia and North America

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 1217-1234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Dai ◽  
Benkui Tan

Previous studies have mainly focused on the influence of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on seasonal-mean conditions over East Asia and North America. This study, instead, proposes an ENSO pathway that influences the weather events over East Asia and North America, in which the eastern Pacific teleconnection pattern (EP) plays an important role. On the one hand, the EP pattern can induce significant surface temperature anomalies over East Asia during its development and mature stages, with the positive (negative) EPs causing colder (warmer) than normal weather events. Besides, the frequency of occurrence of EPs is significantly modulated by ENSO, with 50% of the positive EPs occurring in La Niña winters, and 47% of the negative EPs occurring in El Niño winters. As a result, in El Niño winters, more negative and fewer positive EPs tend to occur, and thus more warm and fewer cold weather events are expected in East Asia. For La Niña winters, the reverse is true. On the other hand, for the EP pattern without its canonical convection pattern (referred to as the nonconvective EP), extremely cold anomalies over the northern United States and western Canada are induced in its negative phase. Moreover, when there are positive sea surface temperature anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific, the frequency of occurrence of negative nonconvective EPs is 2.0 times greater than the climatological value, and thus an enhanced likelihood of extremely cold spells over North America may be expected.

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (14) ◽  
pp. 5221-5241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanyuan Guo ◽  
Mingfang Ting ◽  
Zhiping Wen ◽  
Dong Eun Lee

A neural-network-based cluster technique, the so-called self-organizing map (SOM), was performed to extract distinct sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly patterns during boreal winter. The SOM technique has advantages in nonlinear feature extraction compared to the commonly used empirical orthogonal function analysis and is widely used in meteorology. The eight distinguishable SOM patterns so identified represent three La Niña–like patterns, two near-normal patterns, and three El Niño–like patterns. These patterns show the varied amplitude and location of the SST anomalies associated with El Niño and La Niña, such as the central Pacific (CP) and eastern Pacific (EP) El Niño. The impact of each distinctive SOM pattern on winter-mean surface temperature and precipitation changes over North America was examined. Based on composite maps with observational data, each SOM pattern corresponds to a distinguishable spatial structure of temperature and precipitation anomaly over North America, which seems to result from differing wave train patterns, extending from the tropics to mid–high latitudes induced by longitudinally shifted tropical heating. The corresponding teleconnection as represented by the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Atmospheric Model, version 4 (CAM4), was compared with the observational results. It was found that the 16-member ensemble average of the CAM4 experiments with prescribed SST can reproduce the observed atmospheric circulation responses to the different SST SOM patterns, which suggests that the circulation differences are largely SST driven rather than due to internal atmospheric variability.


2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 421-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuezhi Bai ◽  
Jia Wang

Atmospheric teleconnection circulation patterns associated with severe and mild ice cover over the Great Lakes are investigated using the composite analysis of lake ice data and National Center of Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data for the period 1963–2011. The teleconnection pattern associated with the severe ice cover is the combination of a negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) or Arctic Oscillation (AO) and negative phase of Pacific/North America (PNA) pattern, while the pattern associated with the mild ice cover is the combination of a positive PNA (or an El Niño) and a positive phase of the NAO/AO. These two extreme ice conditions are associated with the North American ridge–trough variations. The intensified ridge–trough system produces a strong northwest-to-southeast tilted ridge and trough and increases the anomalous northwesterly wind, advecting cold, dry Arctic air to the Great Lakes. The weakened ridge–trough system produces a flattened ridge and trough, and promotes a climatological westerly wind, advecting warm, dry air from western North America to the Great Lakes. Although ice cover for all the individual lakes responds roughly linearly and symmetrically to both phases of the NAO/AO, and roughly nonlinearly and asymmetrically to El Niño and La Niña events, the overall ice cover response to individual NAO/AO or Niño3.4 index is not statistically significant. The combined NAO/AO and Niño3.4 indices can be used to reliably project severe ice cover during the simultaneous –NAO/AO and La Niña events, and mild ice cover during the simultaneous +NAO/AO and El Niño events.


2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (13) ◽  
pp. 2872-2880 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Meyers ◽  
Peter McIntosh ◽  
Lidia Pigot ◽  
Mike Pook

Abstract The Indian Ocean zonal dipole is a mode of variability in sea surface temperature that seriously affects the climate of many nations around the Indian Ocean rim, as well as the global climate system. It has been the subject of increasing research, and sometimes of scientific debate concerning its existence/nonexistence and dependence/independence on/from the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, since it was first clearly identified in Nature in 1999. Much of the debate occurred because people did not agree on what years are the El Niño or La Niña years, not to mention the newly defined years of the positive or negative dipole. A method that identifies when the positive or negative extrema of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean dipole occur is proposed, and this method is used to classify each year from 1876 to 1999. The method is statistical in nature, but has a strong basis on the oceanic physical mechanisms that control the variability of the near-equatorial Indo-Pacific basin. Early in the study it was found that some years could not be clearly classified due to strong decadal variation; these years also must be recognized, along with the reason for their ambiguity. The sensitivity of the classification of years is tested by calculating composite maps of the Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature anomaly and the probability of below median Australian rainfall for different categories of the El Niño–Indian Ocean relationship.


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