Abstract
The northward propagation of intraseasonal oscillations (ISO) is one of the major modes of variability in the tropics during boreal summers, associated with active and break spells of monsoon rainfall over the Indian region. These northward propagations modulate the Indian summer monsoon rainfall. The northward march starts close to the equator over warm waters of the Indian Ocean and continues till the foothills of the Himalayas. In this study, we investigate the influence of Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) on northward propagations. We show that northward propagations tend to be weaker during positive Indian Ocean Dipole (pIOD) events. The “moisture mode” framework is used to understand the processes responsible for the weakening of northward propagations during pIOD years. Our analyses show that moistening caused by the horizontal advection is the major contributor for the northward propagations during negative IOD (nIOD) years, and its amplitude is much smaller during pIOD years. Further analyses revealed that the reduction in the advection of the background entropy/moisture by zonal wind perturbations during pIOD is primarily responsible for the reduction in the horizontal advection. The mean structure of entropy between 925 and 500 hpa levels remained similar over most of the Asian monsoon region across the contrasting IOD years, and the reason for weaker northward propagations can be attributed to the weaker zonal wind perturbations at intraseasonal timescales. These weaker zonal wind perturbations during ISO events in pIOD years results from weak Rossby Vortex lobes. The weakening of Rossby wave response owing to cooler than average sea surface temperatures in the South-East Equatorial Indian Ocean and warmer than average West Equatorial Indian Ocean is proposed to be the possible reason for the weakening of northward propagations during pIOD years.
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Data availability
The data used in this study can be downloaded from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis2.html, https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.highres.html, http://oaflux.whoi.edu/data.html,https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.interp_OLR.html and Hersbach et al. (2018) were downloaded from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store.
Code availability
All the codes used in this study were written in NCAR Command Language (NCL). Though they are written specifically for this study, they will be provided to anyone on a request to the author through an e-mail.
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Acknowledgements
PNV acknowledges partial financial support from J C Bose National Fellowship, SERB, DST, Govt. India, and BoBBLE program funded by Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India under its Monsoon Mission program. AK acknowledges financial support from MHRD Govt. India, and Grantham fellowship. We thank NOAA for daily gridded OLR data, daily gridded SST data, NCEP for reanalysis data and OAFlux for daily gridded heat flux data. We would like to thank Copernicus Climate Change and Atmospheric Monitoring Services for the radiation data. We also would like to express our sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for sparing their valuable time helping in the betterment and readability of the manuscript.
Funding
AK has financial support from MHRD Government of India (GOI) and Grantham fellowship. P.N.V has partial financial support from J C Bose National Fellowship, SERB, DST, Government of India (GOI) and BoBBLE program funded by Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India under its Monsoon Mission program.
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Kottapalli, A., Vinayachandran, P.N. On the weakening of northward propagation of intraseasonal oscillations during positive Indian Ocean Dipole events. Clim Dyn 59, 915–938 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06164-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06164-w