Identification

Title

Model biases in the simulation of the springtime North Pacific ENSO teleconnection

Abstract

The wintertime ENSO teleconnection over the North Pacific region consists of an intensified (weakened) low pressure center during El Nino (La Nina) events both in observations and in climate models. Here, it is demonstrated that this teleconnection persists too strongly into late winter and spring in the Community Earth System Model (CESM). This discrepancy arises in both fully coupled and atmosphere-only configurations, when observed SSTs are specified, and is shown to be robust when accounting for the sampling uncertainty due to internal variability. Furthermore, a similar problem is found in many other models from piControl simulations of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (23 out of 43 in phase 5 and 11 out of 20 in phase 6). The implications of this bias for the simulation of surface climate anomalies over North America are assessed. The overall effect on the ENSO composite field (El Nino minus La Nina) resembles an overly prolonged influence of ENSO into the spring with anomalously high temperatures over Alaska and western Canada, and wet (dry) biases over California (southwest Canada). Further studies are still needed to disentangle the relative roles played by diabatic heating, background flow, and other possible contributions in determining the overly strong springtime ENSO teleconnection intensity over the North Pacific.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7wm1hrv

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2020-12-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact