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Northern winter stratospheric polar vortex regimes and their possible influence on the extratropical troposphere

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Abstract

The possible influence of changes in the Arctic stratospheric polar vortex on the extratropical troposphere especially in the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere is still not well understood. Using the ERA5 reanalysis and based on the k-mean clustering algorithm, the northern winter stratospheric polar vortex is categorized into several regimes, which mainly reflect the difference in the intensity and central position of the vortex. As a consequence, the stratospheric polar vortex can be clustered into six groups, including the homogeneously-intensified (HI), homogeneously-weakened (HW), North America-intensified (NAI), North America-weakened (NAW), Eurasia-intensified (EUI), and Eurasia-weakened (EUW) shapes. Statistics of each polar vortex clustering confirms that the yearly frequency of the HI state shows a decreasing trend in past decades, while the HW increases as inferred from the long-term trend. Further, the evolutions of the tropospheric circulation and climate anomalies are explored following each clustering. It is revealed that both the strength and central position of the stratospheric polar vortex significantly modulate the behavior of tropospheric circulation and near surface climate. The relationship between the stratospheric polar vortex regimes and the tropospheric teleconnections are examined. The conventional stratosphere–troposphere coupling via the downward propagation of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)/Arctic Oscillation (AO) signal is confirmed. Other tropospheric teleconnections are also associated with the stratospheric regimes. The Pacific-North American pattern (PNA) is well correlated with the shift of the stratospheric polar vortex, and the Eurasian pattern (EU) is sensitive to the HI and NAW patterns. The patterns of rainfall and temperature anomalies following the six stratospheric regimes are different.

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Data availability

The ERA5 reanalysis data are provided by the ECWMF (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu). The National Centers for Environmental Information distribute the GPCP daily precipitation (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/global-precipitation-climatology-project-gpcp-daily/access/).

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank ECMWF for their providing the ERA5 reanalysis data. We acknowledge the High Performance Computing Center of Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology for their support of this work. The authors thank the National Centers for Environmental Information for their providing the GPCP daily precipitation.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42175069, 91837311).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster, Ministry of Education (KLME)/Joint International Research Laboratory of Climate and Environment Change (ILCEC)/Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters (CIC-FEMD), Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Zhuoqi Liang, Jian Rao, Dong Guo, Qian Lu & Chunhua Shi

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  1. Zhuoqi Liang
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  2. Jian Rao
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Correspondence to Jian Rao.

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Liang, Z., Rao, J., Guo, D. et al. Northern winter stratospheric polar vortex regimes and their possible influence on the extratropical troposphere. Clim Dyn 60, 3167–3186 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06494-9

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