Abstract
El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-related sea surface temperature variability in the eastern equatorial Pacific drives an extratropical large-scale atmospheric response. The atmospheric response is a key driver of global climate variability, with the strongest impact occurring during Northern Hemisphere winter. The degree to which atmospheric circulation variability is altered during ENSO events, in comparison with atmospheric circulation variability during ENSO-neutral conditions, is the focus of this study. Two multi-century, CESM1-CAM4 simulations are compared: a fully coupled experiment (CTRL), and a partially decoupled experiment in which ENSO is dynamically suppressed (NoENSO) so that the mean state is not biased towards a particular ENSO phase. We present evidence that the rectification of ENSO and its teleconnections onto the mean state lead to an underestimation of the asymmetry of ENSO teleconnections in this model. Analyses also show that ENSO displaces 500 hPa geopotential height (Z500) variability away from the central northern U.S. and southern Canada, resulting in less variability during ENSO years than ENSO-neutral years. Additionally, we find that estimating the ENSO-forced change in Z500 variance compared to ENSO-neutral years requires a surprisingly large sample of ENSO-neutral years. The results imply that a substantially longer record–roughly an order of magnitude longer in length–is needed to fully capture the statistics of ENSO’s teleconnected impacts over North America than suggested in previous studies.
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Data availability
CESM2 FCM output is available from the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF; at http://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6). CESM1-CAM4 simulations were run by the authors, and output is available upon request. ERA5 datasets were obtained freely from Copernicus Climate Change Service at https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.f17050d7. NCEP-NCAR Reanalysis 1 data is provided by the NOAA PSL, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their website at https://psl.noaa.gov. ERSSTv5 data provided by NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information at their website https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/extended-reconstructed-sst.
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Acknowledgements
M.S. thanks Drs. Walt Robinson and Anantha Aiyyer for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this work. S.M.L thanks Mahdi Hasan for generating Supplementary Figure S1 and discussions related to ENSO amplitude asymmetry in the CESM1-CAM4 model. We also acknowledge computation support from the NCSU HPC services.
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This work was supported through NSF Grant AGS-2223262.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. S.L performed model experiments and M.S. performed data analysis. The first draft of the manuscript was written by M.S. and all authors commented on and wrote sections in subsequent versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Sutton, M., Larson, S.M. & Becker, E. New insights on ENSO teleconnection asymmetry and ENSO forced atmospheric circulation variability over North America. Clim Dyn 62, 3189–3206 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-07058-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-07058-1