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A new perspective on ENSO-Indian summer monsoon rainfall relationship in a warming environment

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Abstract

A robust estimate of the ENSO-Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) relationship in a changing climate is critically important for projection of the ISMR predictability. In this study, we show that the increasing nonlinear trend of ISMR and global sea surface temperatures (SST) associated with the trend of the global warming mode leads to a ‘long-term’ component to the ENSO-ISMR relationship together with a ‘short-range’ component associated with the ENSO mode. Using historical and projected simulations by some state-of-the-art CMIP5 models, we separate the global warming mode from other oscillatory modes including the ENSO mode through a combined empirical orthogonal function (CEOF) analysis, supported by a signal-to-noise maximizing EOF analysis. We find that the ‘short-term’ ENSO-ISMR relationship, represented by significant negative correlation between JJAS NINO3.4 SST and ISMR does not change appreciably with increase in green-house gas (GHG) forcing while the ‘long-term’ relationship changes from weak to significantly positive. We demonstrate that in a warming environment, the global warming mode must be taken into account together with the ‘natural’ ENSO mode in order to predict ISMR with confidence and emphasize that predictability of ISMR at any given time must be reassessed taking into account contributions from both short and long-term ENSO-ISMR relationships.

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Acknowledgements

Authors are thankful to three anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments which have helped us clarify the text and improve the overall quality of the paper. PP thanks DST for providing research fellowship. SD thanks DST for providing financial assistance in the form of research projects. BNG thanks the Department of Science and technology, Government of India for the DST-SERB Distinguished Fellowship and Cotton University for hosting. The GPCP Precipitation data is provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from website https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/. The CMIP5 multi-model ensemble is available at https://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Program's Working Group on Coupled Modelling which is responsible for CMIP5, and we thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Table 1 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. K Banerjee Centre of Atmospheric and Ocean Studies and M N Saha Centre of Space Studies, University of Allahabad, Allahabad, UP, 211002, India

    Pushpa Pandey & Suneet Dwivedi

  2. Physics Department, Cotton University, Guwahati, India

    B. N. Goswami

  3. The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Earth System Physics Section, Trieste, Italy

    Fred Kucharski

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  1. Pushpa Pandey
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Pandey, P., Dwivedi, S., Goswami, B.N. et al. A new perspective on ENSO-Indian summer monsoon rainfall relationship in a warming environment. Clim Dyn 55, 3307–3326 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05452-7

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