Abstract
The impacts of internal variability on East Asia–Northwest Pacific (EA–NWP) summer rainfall trends on the multidecadal time scale are invested based on three large ensemble simulations, which have ensemble member of 30, 40 and 100. In all the three simulations, the summer rainfall trends during 1970–2005 are remarkably diverse across the individual ensemble members over the EA–NWP, and the signal-to-noise ratio is lower than 1 over the EA–NWP, suggesting a strong impact of internal variability on EA–NWP summer rainfall trends at this interval. Moreover, we found that the diversity of EA–NWP summer rainfall trends across individual members has a similar leading spatial pattern in all the three ensembles, featuring reverse trends between in Mei-yu region and in the tropical NWP. The leading pattern is likely caused by a gradient between the sea surface temperature (SST) trends in the North Indian Ocean (NIO) and in the tropical western Pacific (WP). When there is a warming trend in the NIO and a cooling trend in the tropical WP, a low-level anomalous anticyclone strengthens over the subtropical NWP, causing a dipole rainfall trend over the EA–NWP. The impact of the east–west SST gradient pattern is confirmed by numerical experiments. Our findings highlight that the internally-generated gradient of NIO–WP SST trends is an important source of the uncertainty in EA–NWP summer rainfall decadal changes in simulations.
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Acknowledgements
The study is jointly supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2019YFA0606703), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA20060502), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41425086, 41661144016, 41706026, 41506003, and 41731173). The authors declare no competing interests.
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Gan, R., Hu, K. & Huang, G. The role of internal variability in multi-decadal trends of summer rainfall over East Asia–Northwest Pacific. Clim Dyn 56, 245–257 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05480-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05480-3