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Interaction of the recent 50 year SST trend and La Niña 2010: amplification of the Southern Annular Mode and Australian springtime rainfall

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Abstract

Australia experienced record high rainfall in austral spring 2010, which has previously been attributed to the concurrence of a strong La Niña event and a strong positive excursion of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). In this study, we examine the role of the sea surface temperature (SST) trend over the recent 50 years, which has large warming over the tropical Indian, western Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans, in driving the extraordinary climate conditions of spring 2010, using the Australian Bureau of Meteorology coupled model seasonal forecast system. Four forecast sensitivity experiments were designed by using randomly chosen atmospheric initial conditions but with: (1) observed ocean initial conditions for 1 September 2010; (2) the same ocean initial conditions except the linear temperature trend over the period 1960–2010 was removed; (3) ocean initial conditions in which the trend was added to the climatological ocean state for 1 September; and (4) climatological ocean conditions only. A synergistic response to the La Niña SST anomalies and the SST trend was detected: the tropical rainfall anomalies were amplified over the western side of the Indo-Pacific warm-pool, which led to a significant increase of tropical upper tropospheric warming and a resultant increase of meridional temperature gradient in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) extratropics. Consequently, the SH eddy-driven jet was shifted poleward (i.e. positive phase of the SAM), which induced rainfall over subtropical Australia. Our findings highlight that the interaction of interannual anomalies and the trend may play an important role in the amplification of extreme events.

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Notes

  1. Daily and monthly Australian rainfall data are available from 1900 (Jones et al. 2009).

  2. The linear trend of ocean temperature estimated at 00 UTC 1 September, which is displayed in Fig. 11, is similar to the linear trend obtained using September–November mean data of the BoM’s ocean reanalysis product as evidenced by the pattern correlation of the two SST trends being 0.8. A simple linear estimation of the temperature trend was adopted in this study, but other estimates of the ocean temperature trend have been used in studies with different purposes (e.g. Compo and Sardeshmukh 2010; Christidis et al. 2013a, b; Hope et al. 2015).

  3. NIÑO3.4 index = \(\overline{SSTa}_{{\left( {5^\circ {\text{S}} - 5^\circ {\text{N}},190 - 240^\circ {\text{E}}} \right)}}\), where SSTa indicates SST anomalies, and the overbar denotes area average.

  4. SAM indext = \(\mathop \sum \nolimits_{i}^{I} \mathop \sum \nolimits_{j}^{J}\varvec{\lambda}_{ij} MSLPa_{ijt}\), where λ denotes the 1st eigenvector of the Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) of MSLP anomalies over the domain of 25–75°S, 0–360°E for the period 1980–2009, which is displayed in Fig. 12. MSLPa indicates MSLP anomaly. i, j, and t denote longitude, latitude and time, respectively.

  5. At the sea surface, this inflated temperature trend is the sum of the pattern shown in Fig. 11 (the original trend used for DTR2010) and the pattern of Fig. 1c minus Fig. 5a (i.e. the forecast bias).

  6. \(- \frac{{\partial \left( {\overline{{\left[ {u^{{\prime }} v^{{\prime }} } \right]}} cos^{2} \varphi } \right)}}{{a cos^{2} \varphi *\partial \varphi }}\) on a spherical coordinate, where ϕ is latitude, a is the earth’s radius and u′, v′ are the departure of instantaneous u, v from their time means, respectively (Peixoto and Oort 1991; Seager et al. 2003). Square brackets and overbar denote zonal mean and time mean, respectively. To display eddy momentum flux convergence as a function of latitude and phase speed, we computed the space–time power spectrum by Fourier transforming daily u′, v′ relative to the September–November mean of 2010 at each latitude and then computed the meridional convergence from the space–time momentum flux cospectra at each latitude. We retained zonal wavenumbers 1–15 and smoothed in frequency with 10 passes of a 1–2–1 smoother.

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Acknowledgments

This study is supported by the Victorian Climate Initiative and the Australian Climate Change Science Program. Dr Julie Arblaster is partially supported by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program (RGCM) of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER) Cooperative Agreement # DE-FC02-97ER62402. We are grateful to Dr Guo Liu for technical support to run the forecast experiments and to Drs Matthew Wheeler and Wasyl Drosdowsky and two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments on the manuscript. The NCAR Command Language (NCL 2014) was used for data analysis and visualization of the results.

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  1. Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Eun-Pa Lim, Harry H. Hendon, Julie M. Arblaster, Christine Chung, Aurel F. Moise, Pandora Hope, Griffith Young & Mei Zhao

  2. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Julie M. Arblaster

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Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 11 and 12.

Fig. 11
figure 11

The observed SST trend estimated from September 1st 00 UTC conditions over 1960–2010, using the ocean reanalysis set generated from PEODAS (Yin et al. 2011). This pattern has 0.65 correlation with the observed SON trend pattern shown in Fig. 1c over the low latitudes of 20°S–20°N and 0.51 correlation over the globe

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Fig. 12
figure 12

ERA-Interim reanalysis monthly MSLP anomalies regressed onto the standardized time series of the 1st mode of the EOF analysis of monthly mean MSLP anomalies, which is used as the SAM index in this study. The EOF analysis was performed on the MSLP anomalies weighted by cosine latitude over the domain of 20–75°S in the period of 1980–2009. The pattern shows the positive phase of SAM (high SAM), and the explained variance of this mode is indicated in the top right corner of the figure (taken from Lim and Hendon 2015a, their Fig. 2)

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Lim, EP., Hendon, H.H., Arblaster, J.M. et al. Interaction of the recent 50 year SST trend and La Niña 2010: amplification of the Southern Annular Mode and Australian springtime rainfall. Clim Dyn 47, 2273–2291 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2963-9

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