Abstract
Heat waves, can be exacerbated by the co-occurrence of daytime heat waves and nighttime heat waves. Over China, the Yangtze–Huaihe River basin (YHRB) is the core region of the occurrence of such “compound heat waves”, which exert profound impacts on the society and ecosystems. However, the physical mechanisms responsible for the variability of the YHRB compound heat waves remain unclear. In this study, the interannual variability of YHRB compound heat waves in peak summer (July–August) and its possible causes are investigated based on station observations across China and global reanalysis datasets. A strong link is found between the previous winter Arctic Oscillation (AO) and these peak-summer compound heat waves. During a negative AO in winter, an anomalous tripolar pattern of sea surface temperature (SST) in the North Atlantic is induced by the AO-related atmospheric circulation. Such tripolar SST pattern can persist until the following summer. By that time, oceanic forcing dominates, and positive SST anomalies over the tropical North Atlantic can excite a Rossby wave train propagating eastward from the southwest coast of North America to East Asia. This results in a northwest-southeast tilted high pressure system over the YHRB, favoring the occurrence of peak-summer compound heat waves. Such a delayed influence of the winter AO, together with the North Atlantic capacitor effect, is clearly seen in a case study of the YHBR compound heat waves in 2010. The proposed mechanism is further verified based on numerical experiments with an atmospheric general circulation model.
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Data Availability
The ERA5 data were obtained from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (monthly: https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.6860a573; and hourly: https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.bd0915c6). The in-situ observations were obtained via the China Meteorological Administration National Meteorological Information Center (http://data.cma.cn/en).
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate the constructive comments made by the anonymous reviewer, which are helpful for improving the overall quality of the paper. This study was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 42088101, Grant 42105015, Grant 42175023), the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC1510400), and the Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies (Grant 2020B1212060025).
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The study was designed by TZ, JW, C-YT, and N-CL. TZ was reponsible for data complilation, analyses. JW was responsible for model experiment design. All authors contributed to the manuscript preparation.
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Zhang, T., Tam, CY., Lau, NC. et al. Influences of the boreal winter Arctic Oscillation on the peak-summer compound heat waves over the Yangtze–Huaihe River basin: the North Atlantic capacitor effect. Clim Dyn 59, 2331–2343 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06212-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06212-5