Abstract
Tibetan Plateau (TP) summer precipitation, whose first leading mode presents a dipole oscillation between the northeastern and southeastern TP, plays important roles in the water cycle and atmospheric circulation. Using a weakly coupled data assimilation (WCDA) system to constrain the atmospheric component in a coupled model with a global atmospheric reanalysis product, this study demonstrates significant improvements in predicting the interannual variation of summer precipitation over the eastern TP, capturing the strong reversal mode between the northeastern and southeastern TP. These improvements are mainly attributed to the strong air–sea coupling over the North Atlantic (NA) and its remote impacts on the TP precipitation. This coupling allows observation-constrained atmosphere to significantly influence initial conditions (ICs) of sea surface temperature (SST) in the NA area and then obviously affect predictions of both NA SST and summer North Atlantic Oscillation (SNAO), which affects the downstream TP atmospheric circulation through the wave train of Eliassen-Palm (EP) stationary wave flux. This study highlights the importance of NA air–sea coupling in the interannual predictability of TP precipitation and suggests a new source of interannual predictability of TP precipitation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1433-1448 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Climate Dynamics |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue number | 5-6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2021 |
Funding
The first author and corresponding authors acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China for supporting the project through Grant No. 91737307 and 41875127. We thank the National Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Administration for compiling the observational and making them available, and we thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. All the ERA-40 data are available at https://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/era40-moda/levtype=sfc/ . All the ERA-Interim data are available at https://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-moda/levtype=sfc/ . The NCEP-NCAR reanalysis could be gained through https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html . The HadISST data could be accessed via https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/ . The hindcast results of coupled climate models participated in CMIP5 near-term experiments results are accessible via the website ( http://www.ipcc-data.org/sim/gcm_monthly/AR5/Reference-Archive.html ).
Keywords
- Air–sea coupling
- Summer north Atlantic oscillation
- Tibetan plateau summer precipitation
- Weakly coupled data assimilation