Abstract
This study reveals an interdecadal change in boreal winter dominant ENSO atmospheric teleconnection and demonstrates its underlying physical mechanism. During the period 1960–2020, the ENSO teleconnection was characterized by the Western Pacific (WP) pattern and the Pacific–North American (PNA) pattern, but the dominant pattern of ENSO teleconnection witnessed an alternation at around early 1980s. In the first epoch of 1960–1979 (E1), the ENSO teleconnection was mainly dominated by the WP pattern with an inhibited PNA pattern, whereas in the second epoch of 1987–2020 (E2), the ENSO teleconnection was dominated by the PNA pattern without a prominent WP pattern.
It is further suggested that the changing strength of the westerly jet, rather than the pattern of the ENSO-related tropical convection, played the critical role in the alternation of the winter dominant ENSO teleconnection. During E1, because the westerly jet stream in the East Asia–North Pacific sector was relatively weak, poleward propagation of the Rossby wave train from the western Pacific was evident, forming the dominant WP pattern related to ENSO. In E2, because the westerly jet in the region largely strengthened, the PNA pattern was dominant owing to the enhanced zonal waveguide of the westerly jet. Evidence from a set of numerical experiments and the simulations of CMIP6 models supports the important role of the westerly jet strength in shaping the ENSO teleconnection.
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Data availability
The datasets are available in a public repository that assigns persistent identifiers to them. The monthly mean geopotential height, zonal and meridional wind, air temperature, and potential vorticity at different levels provided by ERA5 are openly available at https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5. (2) The monthly mean SST data from the improved Extended Reconstructed SST dataset (version 5) are available at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.ersst.v5.html. (3) The monthly precipitation anomaly data reconstructed by NOAA are available at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.prec.html. (4) CMIP6 model data are from the Earth System Grid Federation and relevant model outputs are accessible at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge ESCAPE team members for their support and we also thank the High-Performance Computing Center at Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology for computing support.
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This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFF0801702) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42175033).
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Zhiwei Zhu contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Jingdan Mao and Zhiwei Zhu. The manuscript was written by Zhiwei Zhu and Jingdan Mao.
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Mao, J., Zhu, Z. Change of boreal winter dominant ENSO teleconnection modulated by the East Asian westerly jet strength. Clim Dyn (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-024-07261-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-024-07261-8