Abstract
The Great Plains Low-Level Jet (GPLLJ) is an important driver of precipitation and severe weather outbreaks over the US Great Plains and undergoes large interannual variability. Therefore, to reliably make predictions and projections of Great Plains precipitation, it is essential for the observed influence of ENSO on the GPLLJ to be understood and simulated accurately by global climate models. This study uses four reanalyzes and an ensemble of 42 historical simulations from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) to investigate the accuracy of the simulated ENSO–GPLLJ teleconnection. From observations, winter ENSO has a significant negative correlation with the GPLLJ in the following spring and a significant positive correlation with the GPLLJ in the following summer. Here, it is shown that the influence of ENSO is on the frequency, not intensity, of GPLLJ events in the spring, while both the frequency and intensity of GPLLJ events are affected in the summer. However, although the majority of CMIP5 historical simulations exhibit the observed significant negative ENSO–GPLLJ correlations in the spring, nearly all of them fail to simulate the significant positive correlation in the summer. The ability of the models to simulate the ENSO–GPLLJ relationship is attributed to the strength of simulated ENSO events and the associated effects on geopotential heights and atmospheric circulation. These results have implications for the predictability of weather and climate in the Great Plains and suggest that the variability of the GPLLJ will not be reliably captured in future climate simulations if the magnitude of ENSO events and their impacts are not well represented.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous reviewer for thoughtful comments and suggestions that greatly strengthened the manuscript. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP5, and thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP5, the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. Support for the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project version 2c dataset is provided by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER), and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office. ERA20C and ERA-Interim data is provided courtesy of ECMWF, and CFSR data is carried out by the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). We also acknowledge the Met Office Hadley Centre for providing HadISST1 data.
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Danco, J.F., Martin, E.R. Understanding the influence of ENSO on the Great Plains low-level jet in CMIP5 models. Clim Dyn 51, 1537–1558 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3970-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3970-9