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Tropical impact on the interannual variability and long-term trend of the Southern Annular Mode during austral summer from 1960/1961 to 2001/2002

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Abstract

Tropical influence on the austral summer Southern Annular Mode (SAM) over the ERA-40 period 1960/1961–2001/2002 is investigated using (1) a partially coupled climate model (PCM) driven by observed wind stress and (2) a version of the ECMWF atmospheric model by means of a relaxation technique. We show that the tropical influence in the PCM is dominated by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) whereas the relaxation experiments suggest an additional influence independent of ENSO. In the observations, we find that the simultaneous influence of ENSO on the summer SAM was much stronger after 1979 than before, with the consequence that the ensemble mean of the PCM captures around 50 % of the interannual variance of the SAM after 1979 and less than 10 % before. Nevertheless, in the ensemble mean of the PCM, the relationship between ENSO and the summer SAM is stable throughout the whole period 1960/1961–2001/2002, and it is the individual ensemble members that exhibit a non-stationary relationship like that found in the observations. It follows that variability not related to the observed wind forcing used to drive the PCM is important for obscuring the ENSO/SAM relationship. The experiments using relaxation show that tropical forcing was important for both the interannual variability and the trend of the summer SAM, even before 1979. Adding the observed extratropical sea surface temperature and sea-ice (SSTSI) to the tropical relaxation runs improves the model performance, indicative of a positive feedback from extratropical SSTSI onto the SAM.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that their study period covers the 25 summers from 1979/1980 to 2003/2004 and that they define summer as the months November–February.

  2. \(\sigma\) refers to one standard deviation of the SAM index from ERA-40 for which the corresponding spatial pattern is shown in Fig. 3a.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been funded by the BMBF MiKlip Project MODINI, by the DFG under ISOLAA (a project within the Priority Programme 1158), and by GEOMAR. We are grateful to the Rechnenzentrum of Universität Kiel for the use of computer time. We thank Mojib Latif and Wonsun Park for making the KCM available for us and to Thomas Jung and Soumia Serrar for providing us with the output from the ECMWF model runs. We are also grateful to ECMWF for the provision of the model and the use of computer facilities to carry out some of the model runs reported here. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

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  1. GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Kiel, Germany

    Hui Ding, Richard J. Greatbatch & Gereon Gollan

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  1. Hui Ding
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Correspondence to Hui Ding.

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Ding, H., Greatbatch, R.J. & Gollan, G. Tropical impact on the interannual variability and long-term trend of the Southern Annular Mode during austral summer from 1960/1961 to 2001/2002. Clim Dyn 44, 2215–2228 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2299-x

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