Open AccessEnlarged Asymmetry of Tropical Pacific Rainfall Anomalies Induced by El Niño and La Niña under Global Warming
Author(s) -
Ping Huang,
Dong Chen
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of climate
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.315
H-Index - 287
eISSN - 1520-0442
pISSN - 0894-8755
DOI - 10.1175/jcli-d-16-0427.1
Subject(s) - climatology , anomaly (physics) , environmental science , el niño southern oscillation , asymmetry , climate model , geology , common spatial pattern , general circulation model , atmospheric sciences , climate change , physics , oceanography , condensed matter physics , statistics , mathematics , quantum mechanics
El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most important sources of climate interannual variability. A prominent characteristic of ENSO is the asymmetric, or so-called nonlinear, local rainfall response to El Niño (EN) and La Niña (LN), in which the maximum rainfall anomalies during EN are located farther east than those during LN. In this study, the changes in rainfall anomalies during EN and LN are examined based on the multimodel ensemble mean results of 32 CMIP5 models under the representative concentration pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario. It is found that robust EN–LN asymmetric changes in rainfall anomalies exist. The rainfall anomalies during EN and LN both shift eastward and intensify under global warming, but the eastward shift during EN is farther east than that during LN. A simplified moisture budget decomposition method is applied to study the mechanism of the asymmetric response. The results show that the robust increase in mean-state moisture can enlarge the EN–LN asymmetry of the rainfall anomalies, and the spatial relative changes in mean-state SST with an El Niño–like pattern can shift the rainfall anomalies farther east during EN than during LN, enlarging the difference in the zonal locations of the rainfall response to EN and LN. The role of the relative changes in mean-state SST can also be interpreted as follows: the decreased zonal gradient of mean-state SST due to El Niño–like warming leads to a larger EN–LN asymmetry of rainfall anomalies under a future warming climate.