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Precipitation diurnal cycle over the maritime continent modulated by ENSO

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Abstract

This study examines the modulation by ENSO of the diurnal cycle of precipitation in boreal winter for the period 1998–2016 over the maritime continent (MC), using the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission data and the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model. The diurnal cycles are composited for the ENSO warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) phases. It is found that there are statistically significant differences in the diurnal cycle amplitude between El Niño and La Niña, with a non-uniform spatial pattern over the MC. The amplitude of precipitation diurnal cycle is larger over the western MC but smaller over the eastern MC during El Niño, and vice versa for La Niña. A diagnosis of the moisture budget shows that the difference in the diurnal cycle amplitude is primarily attributed to the vertically integrated convergence of the interannual background moisture by diurnal winds. A further analysis indicates that the ENSO-related background moisture plays a key role in causing the difference in diurnal wind activity between El Niño and La Niña, which leads to the difference in the precipitation diurnal cycle.

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Data availability statement

Datasets are available in a public repository that assigns persistent identifiers to datasets. TRMM 3B42 data and MERRA data are downloaded from NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center at http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/TRMM and https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/MERRA. TRMM 3G68 data is downloaded from Asia–Pacific Data Research Center (http://apdrc.soest.hawaii.edu/data/data.php). ETOPO2 data is openly available at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/global.html, and ONI index data is available at https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Editor and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by NSFC grants 42088101 and 41875069, and Postgraduate Research and Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province KYCX21_0943. We acknowledge the High Performance Computing Center of Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology for their support of this work.

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

    Jiahao Lu, Tim Li & Xinyong Shen

  2. Suzhou Meteorological Bureau of Jiangsu Province, Suzhou, 215131, China

    Jiahao Lu

  3. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

    Tim Li

  4. Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai, 519082, China

    Xinyong Shen

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Lu, J., Li, T. & Shen, X. Precipitation diurnal cycle over the maritime continent modulated by ENSO. Clim Dyn 61, 2547–2564 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06699-6

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