Abstract
The influence of strong Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events on the evolution of the following year’s La Niña events is investigated using the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center (NMEFC) operational seasonal forecasting system. The observation results show that when the strong IOD occurs, the tropical Pacific can be in different sea surface temperature states. As such prediction system can well reproduce the air-sea evolution of the 1998/1999 and 2020/2021 La Niña events, the ocean temperature initializations in December during above events were perturbed with the system to assess the role of the oceanic channel and atmospheric bridge across the maritime continent in the forecasting of the La Niña events 1 year later. In the case of the neutral state of the tropical Pacific at the peak of the 2019 positive IOD, pacemaker experiments have demonstrated that the Indian Ocean subsurface temperature initialization in December 2019 is critically important for the successful prediction of the 2020/2021 La Niña. Experiments of sea surface temperature initialization in December 2019, with only the Indo-Pacific atmospheric bridge at work, failed to predict the 2020/2021 La Niña 1 year in advance. The comparison underlined the dominant role of the oceanic channel dynamics in the evolution of the 2020/2021 La Niña. Forecasting experiments beginning from the 1997/98 El Niño with and without the IOD initializations suggest that the delayed feedback of the tropical Pacific coupled system is more important in the forecasting of the 1998/1999 La Niña, with the Indo-Pacific oceanic channel dynamics playing a secondary yet very important role. Our study has underscored the importance of the Indo-Pacific oceanic channel dynamics in ENSO prediction and suggested the effectiveness of IOD subsurface temperature initialization in La Niña predictions at the 1-year lead time.
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Data availability
The sea surface temperature is available from the NOAA Optimum Interpolation SST at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.html and NOAA Extended Reconstructed SST V5 at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.ersst.v5.html. NCEP-DOE Reanalysis 2 data was downloaded at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis2.html, and the Model data is available upon request to the corresponding author.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2020YFA0608804), NSFC (42206029, 41720104008, 91858204), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB42000000), and Southern Marine and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) (SML2020SP008). D.Y. is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFA0606703), by the “Taishan Scholar Project” of the Shandong province, and by the “Kunpeng Outstanding Scholar Project” of the FIO/MNR of China.
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This research was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2020YFA0608804), NSFC (42206029, 41720104008, 91858204), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB42000000), and Southern Marine and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) (SML2020SP008).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by [SZ] and [JW]. The first draft of the manuscript was written by [SZ] and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhang, S., Wang, J., Jiang, H. et al. Effects of Indian Ocean Dipole initialization on the forecasting of La Niña 1 year in advance. Clim Dyn 61, 4661–4677 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06816-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06816-5