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Two leading modes of the interannual variability in South American surface air temperature during austral winter

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Abstract

The first two empirical orthogonal function (EOF) modes of the surface air temperature (SAT) interannual variability in the South American (SA) continent have been revealed in several previous studies. This presentation focuses on winter season and furtherly investigates the detailed advection and cloud-radiation processes and teleconnections from tropical sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA) combining statistical analysis with Rossby wave dynamics and modelling experiments. The EOF1, featured with the anomalous center in the central part, is related to the tropical eastern Pacific SSTA, which may impact on the SA SAT variability through the Walker circulation and a regional Hadley cell. The anomalous center is largely attributed to low-level advection transported by the Hadley cell. The EOF2, as a fluctuation between anomalies in the southeast Brazil and the southern tip, is related to the SSTA surrounding the Maritime Continent, which may generate a barotropic wave train propagating to the SA continent. This wave train can strengthen high latitude westerly flow transporting warm advection to the southern tip, and generate southeast anomalous flow transporting cold advection to the southeast Brazil. Meanwhile, the cloud-radiation processes are also involved to enhance the advection-induced SAT anomalies in both areas.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for providing useful comments. This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (projects 41575060 and 91437216), the SOA International Cooperation Program on Global Change and Air-Sea Interactions (GASI-IPOVAI-03). NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data, PREC precipitation data, and ERSST V4 data are provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yanjie Li

  2. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology and College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Jianping Li

  3. Laboratory for Regional Oceanography and Numerical Modeling, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266237, China

    Jianping Li

  4. Earth System Physics Section, Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, Trieste, 34151, Italy

    Fred Kucharski

  5. Institute of Urban Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China

    Jin Feng

  6. School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Sen Zhao

  7. Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster of Ministry of Education, and College of Atmospheric Science, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Sen Zhao

  8. State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China

    Jiayu Zheng

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  1. Yanjie Li
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Li, Y., Li, J., Kucharski, F. et al. Two leading modes of the interannual variability in South American surface air temperature during austral winter. Clim Dyn 51, 2141–2156 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-4004-3

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