The surface radiative imbalance has large impacts on the long-term trends and year-to-year variability of Arctic sea ice. Clouds are believed to be a key factor in regulating this radiative imbalance, whose underlying processes and mechanisms, however, are not well understood. Compared with observations, the Community Earth System Model version 1 (CESM1) is known to underestimate Arctic cloud liquid

The Arctic cryosphere is changing rapidly due to global warming. Northern Svalbard is a warming hotspot with a temperature rise of ~ 6 °C over the last three decades. Concurrently, modelled data suggest a marked increase in glacier runoff during recent decades in northern Svalbard, and runoff is projected to increase. However, observational data from before anthropogenic influence are sparse and the

In the Original publication of the article, the grant number was incorrectly published in the acknowledge section.

Using the historical, moderate emission scenario (RCP45/SSP245), and high emission scenario (RCP85/SSP585) experiments provided by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phases 5 and 6 (CMIP5/6), future changes of stratospheric final warming (SFW) events are explored in this study. Most CMIP5/6 models project a delay of SFWs in the two future scenarios, compared with historical simulation in both

Local scale estimates of temperature change in the twenty-first century are necessary for informed decision making in both the public and private sector. In order to generate such estimates for Chile, weather station data of the Dirección Meteorológica de Chile are used to identify large-scale predictors for local-scale temperature changes and construct individual empirical-statistical models for each

Mei-yu fronts are often accompanied with prominent diabatic heating due to the development of frontal clouds and rain bands. The direct effect and relative importance of diabatic heating on the spatiotemporal morphology of Mei-yu fronts however remain unclear. Here a new frontogenesis function is derived to isolate the effect of diabatic heating and this function is then applied to the latest high

Tropics nurture three different types of convective clouds, i.e., shallow cumulus, cumulus congestus, and deep cumulonimbus. The vertical structure of clouds holds a crucial metric in studying tropical clouds. Ground-based high-resolution cloud radar measurements are the potential candidate in exploring the characteristics of various types of tropical clouds and their evolution. Quality-controlled

The article: Interannual and decadal covariabilities in East Asian and Western North Pacifc summer.

Understanding future precipitation changes is critical for water supply and flood risk applications in the western United States. The North American COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment (NA-CORDEX) matrix of global and regional climate models at multiple resolutions (~ 50-km and 25-km grid spacings) is used to evaluate mean monthly precipitation, extreme daily precipitation, and snow water equivalent

Australian maximum temperatures have reached record values in recent austral springs and are projected to increase further in a warming world. We focus on three record spring heat events in September 2013, October–November 2014 and October 2015, and examine the anomalous atmospheric circulation associated with these events in reanalysis and a sub-seasonal to seasonal prediction system, POAMA, to identify

This study investigates the role of the interannual variation of boreal winter (December–February) snow cover over the Tibetan Plateau (TPSC) in modulating the relationship between the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) and tropical cyclogenesis over the western North Pacific (WNP) during the following boreal summer (June–October). During the boreal summer following a high snow cover anomaly (SCA), MJO-associated

The present study examined the relationship between turbulent surface heat flux (SHF) and sea surface temperature (SST) variations using daily observational data. The SHF and SST relationship displays notable differences between winter and summer and prominent time-scale dependence in both seasons. In the mid-latitude SST frontal regions, SST has a larger role in driving SHF in winter than in summer

As a semi-permanent circulation system at the upper troposphere, the South Asian high (SAH) profoundly influences the Asian climate. However, its impact on the underlying tropical cyclone (TC) genesis in the South China Sea (SCS) remains unknown. Here we show that the leading mode of eastern-central SAH and TC genesis (TCG) number in the SCS during July–September are significantly correlated with a

European heat waves result from large-scale stationary waves and have major impacts on the economy and mortality. However, the dynamical processes leading to and maintaining heat waves are still not well understood. Here we use a nonlinear stationary wave model (NSWM) to examine the role played by anomalous stationary waves and how they are forced during heat waves. For our study, we use the Japanese

The Choco low-level jet is among the main regional circulation mechanisms related to the advection of water vapor from the eastern Pacific to northwestern South America. Variations in the intensity of position of the jet core are identified as determinant for regional moisture transport and associated rainfall. This paper analyzes the annual cycle of intensity and latitudinal location of this jet according

The spatio-temporal variations of the significant wave height (SWH) in the Western North Pacific and South China Sea (WNP-SCS) region, as well as their driving mechanisms, are investigated based on the long-term (1981–2014) simulation by a coupled ocean–atmosphere model and a WAVEWATCH III model. The Empirical Orthogonal Function modes of SWH anomalies show different patterns in the cold and warm seasons

Previous studies suggested that the dry–wet surface state over the Indo-China Peninsula (ICP), closely associated with the local spring precipitation, is an important seasonal predictor for the East Asian summer monsoon and extreme climate. Hence, this work investigates the inter-annual variability of spring precipitation over the ICP and its relationship with El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) during

Regional seasonal forecasting requires accurate simulation of the variability of local climate drivers. The South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ) is a large region of low-level convergence, clouds and precipitation in the South Pacific, whose effects extend as far as northeast Australia (NEA). The location of the SPCZ is modulated by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which causes rainfall variability

The 0.6 °C warming observed in global temperature datasets from 1940 to 1960 to 2000–2020 can be partially due to urban heat island (UHI) and other non-climatic biases in the underlying data, although several previous studies have argued to the contrary. Here we identify land regions where such biases could be present by locally evaluating their diurnal temperature range (DTR = TMax − TMin trends between

Winter precipitation over South China tends to increase with enhancement of the 10–30-day intraseasonal oscillation (ISO) during El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events from 1981 to 2017. This study shows that, in contrast with central Pacific El Niño and La Niña events, the 10–30-day ISO of rainfall particularly intensify during eastern Pacific (EP) El Niño events. The seasonal evolution of the

The South China Sea (SCS) serves as the main source of moisture for rainfall in Southern China (SC) and the meridional moisture transport to SC is dominated by wind changes during the first rainy season (April–June). El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Tropical Northwestern Pacific (TNWP) variability modulate the SC rainfall through anomalous anticyclonic circulation over the western North Pacific

In this study, we examined the temporal variations of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) prediction skill during 1958–2016 in the context of the evolution in the tropical Pacific subsurface ocean observing system. To examine the temporal variations of the seasonal prediction skill, spatial correlation skill (SCS) of the predicted SST anomalies (SSTA) in the tropical Pacific Ocean within 10oS-10oN

The present study examines the long-term evolution of the Subantarctic Mode Water (SAMW) in the south Indian Ocean (SIO) based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) extended simulations through 2300 under Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 (RCP4.5). The SAMW in the SIO shrinks and thins rapidly during the fast radiative forcing increasing period between 2000 and 2100.

This study investigates the summer climate variability over Korea that is associated with diverse features of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) evolution. Four different ENSO evolution features were analyzed, and the related Korean climate variability during July and August are investigated. The two evolution phases in which El Niño transitions into La Niña and El Niño develops from a neutral state

Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are the primary climate information available to public stakeholders and city-planners to support local adaptation policies. However, with resolution in the order of ten kilometres, RCMs do not explicitly represent cities and their influence on local climate (e.g. Urban Heat Island; UHI). Downscaling methods are required to bridge the gap between RCMs and city scale.

The Northern Annular Mode (NAM) dominates variability of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) wintertime extratropical circulation in both the troposphere and stratosphere. Changes in the tropospheric NAM (i.e., changes in the position and strength of the polar jet stream) directly alter NH mid-latitude temperature and precipitation patterns, making forecasting these changes a significant priority for sub

The original article can be found online.

One of the main modes of sea surface temperature variability in the Tropical Atlantic is the Atlantic Equatorial Mode or Atlantic Niño. The region of largest interannual variability, where the Atlantic Cold Tongue forms, is also a region of consistent biases in climate models. In this study, we investigate the interannual variability of the Tropical Atlantic and its changes in the recent decades in

We investigate winter Arctic Amplification (AA) on synoptic timescales and at regional scales using a daily version of the Arctic Amplification Index (AAI) and examine causes on a synoptic scale. The persistence, frequency and intensity of high AAI events show significant increases over the Arctic. Similarly, low AAI events are decreasing in frequency, persistence and intensity. In both cases, there

We examine the transition processes of El Niño occurring in 1 year after using observations, a multi-century model simulation and atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) experiments. One type is characterized by a quick transition from an El Niño event into a La Niña event in the following winter, and the other type involves a slow decay to an almost neutral state or a continuous El Niño event

Climate models predict that East Asia (EA) will be substantially warmer than the present despite large inter-model uncertainty. This study investigated the major sources of the climate projections and the inter-model uncertainty. Particularly, we decomposed the differences in surface temperatures between the historical and RCP8.5 runs from 26 CMIP5 into partial surface temperature changes due to individual

Past versions of global surface temperature (ST) datasets have been shown to have underestimated the recent warming trend over 1998–2012. This study uses a newly updated global land surface air temperature and a land and marine surface temperature dataset, referred to as China global land surface air temperature (C-LSAT) and China merged surface temperature (CMST), to estimate trends in the global

The northern East Asian low (NEAL), characterized by a mid-latitude closed low (or trough) in the lower troposphere, is an important component of the East Asian summer monsoon system. This study investigates formation mechanism of the summer NEAL, with emphasis on the roles of diabatic heating and transient eddy forcing, using a linear baroclinic model (LBM) with prescribed forcing derived from the

We investigate the impact of large climatological biases in the tropical Atlantic on reanalysis and seasonal prediction performance using the Norwegian Climate Prediction Model (NorCPM) in a standard and an anomaly coupled configuration. Anomaly coupling corrects the climatological surface wind and sea surface temperature (SST) fields exchanged between oceanic and atmospheric models, and thereby significantly

Modelling the rare but high-impact Mediterranean Heavy Precipitation Events (HPEs) at climate scale remains a largely open scientific challenge. The issue is adressed here by running a 38-year-long continuous simulation of the CNRM-AROME Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Model (CP-RCM) at a 2.5 km horizontal resolution and over a large pan-Alpine domain. First, the simulation is evaluated through

The original version of the article contained errors in Fig.

Climate zones fundamentally shape the patterns of the terrestrial environment and human habitation. How global warming alters their current distribution is an important question that has yet to be properly addressed. Using root-layer soil moisture as an indicator, this study investigates potential future changes in climate zones with the perturbed parameter ensemble of climate projections by the HadGEM3-GC3

The present study examines subseasonal prediction skills and biases of the summer rainfall over eastern China in the Beijing Climate Center (BCC) Atmospheric General Circulation Model (BCC_AGCM2.2) and assesses the predictability of eastern China summer rainfall based on the multi-member forecasts. The BCC_AGCM2.2 model shows some skill in predicting summer rainfall over eastern China within the lead-times

South Africa spans the subtropics at the interface between tropical, subtropical, and temperate weather systems, and consequently experiences distinct summer-, winter- and year-round rainfall zones (SRZ, WRZ and YRZ). Spatio-temporal characteristics of the various weather systems are broadly understood, however, the rainfall seasonality classification at the transition between these rainfall zones

The impact of sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) over the North Pacific (32°–45° N, 140° E–150° W) and North Atlantic (north: 52°–68° N, 60°–20° W; south: 0°–30° N, 100°–40° W) on the summer surface air temperature (SAT) over the Mongolian Plateau (MP) is studied using NCEP/NCAR and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) reanalysis data. The results show that the circumglobal teleconnection (CGT) wave

The recent increase in Atlantic and Pacific ocean heat transports has led to a decrease in Arctic sea-ice area and volume. As the respective contributions from both oceans in driving sea-ice loss is still uncertain, our study explores this. We use the EC-Earth3 coupled global climate model and perform different sensitivity experiments to gain insights into the relationships between ocean heat transport

The dynamic and thermal effects of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) on the precipitation in the Asian arid and monsoon regions were investigated using three numerical experiments—one using real topography, one with the whole TP removed, and one with sensible heat turned off over the TP. The results show that there are strong seasonal and regional differences in the dynamic and thermal effects of the TP on

Recent research suggests the widespread existence of the signal-to-noise paradox in seasonal-to-decadal climate predictions. The essence of the paradox is that the signal-to-noise ratio in models can be unrealistically small and models may make better predictions of the observations than they predict themselves. The paradox highlights a potentially serious issue with model predictions as previous studies

Net primary productivity (NPP) is an important indicator of plant dynamics and the net carbon exchange between the terrestrial ecosystem and atmosphere. Both the long-term shifts in climate mean (climate change) and short-term variations around the climate mean (climate variability) have impacts on NPP but studies examining both aspects of climate variations are rare especially in the data-scarce regions

To evaluate the atmosphere–ocean coupled data assimilation system developed at the Meteorological Research Institute, the lead-lag relation between the intraseasonal variations (with a time scale of 20–100 days) in precipitation and sea surface temperature (SST) is examined in the tropics. It is shown that the relationship over the tropical western Pacific in the coupled reanalysis experiment (CDA)

The summer rainfall change over East Asia in response to CO2 forcing and the associated processes are investigated via a set of pilot timeslice piSST experiments from the Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 (CFMIP-3). The total response of rainfall to 4 \(\times \) CO2 in coupled models is decomposed into components associated with uniform SST warming, SST pattern change, the direct

Snowstorms frequently occur in spring over the heterogeneous underlying surface of the Tibetan Plateau, causing both economic and societal damage. What the intensity of factors triggering snowstorms remains poorly understood. This study quantitatively diagnoses water vapor, the thermodynamic and dynamic conditions of a large-scale heavy snowfall event over the Tibetan Plateau using reanalysis data

In the original version of the article, in both the Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 the plots (a) and (b) were repeated twice.

Lake-air interaction plays an important role in controlling local weather and climate. This study aims to reveal the dynamical effect of water-land roughness contrast on precipitation during a summer rainfall event, which was detected by rain gauge and remote sensing observations around Lake Selin Co (a large Tibetan lake). During this event, precipitation amount to the west (downwind) of the lake

Shenzhen city, located in southern China and governed by the East Asian monsoon climate system, has experienced rapid urbanization since the beginning of the 1980s, and had become an international metropolis by the 2010s. Urban-induced changes in rainfall of various intensity grades over Shenzhen are investigated using nested numerical integrations at 3.3 km spatial resolution, within which urban surface

A dominant paradigm for mid-latitude air-sea interaction identifies the synoptic-scale atmospheric “noise” as the main driver for the observed ocean surface variability. While this conceptual model successfully holds over most of the mid-latitude ocean surface, its soundness over frontal zones (including western boundary currents; WBC) characterized by intense mesoscale activity, has been questioned

Extreme ocean waves can have devastating impacts on many populous coastal regions or offshore islands. Yet, knowledge of how ocean waves are likely to respond to future climate change remains limited. To assess potential increases in risk associated with extreme ocean waves, future changes in seasonal mean and extreme significant wave height (SWH) are examined over the Indian Ocean (IO) using 18 Coupled

In regions featuring strong convective activity (such as the Congo Basin, CB), turbulent mixing in the planetary boundary layer strongly affects the water budget. In this study, we use a process-based evaluation to assess the performance of the Rossby Centre Regional Climate Model (RCM) RCA4 in simulating the September–November CB rainfall, under conditions of strong and weak turbulent mixing. To this

Argo observations revealed dramatic sea surface salinity (SSS) changes in the northeastern tropical Pacific Ocean (NETPO) during the past one and half decades, with a steady increase during 2004–2012 and a sharp decrease during 2013–2016. These changes mainly result from anomalous precipitation associated with the Walker Circulation through moisture transport across Central America. The anomalous Walker

Atmospheric blockings are generally associated with large-scale high-pressure systems that interrupt west-to-east atmospheric flow in mid and high latitudes. Blockings cause several days of quasi-stationary weather conditions, and therefore can result in monthly or seasonal climate anomalies and extreme weather events on the affected regions. In this paper, the long-term coupled CERA-20C reanalysis

Walker circulations near East Africa are identified and their influence on the interannual variability of East African rainfall is explored in multiple reanalyses and observational precipitation datasets. The robustness of methodology for identifying 2-dimensional overturning circulations in a three-dimensional flow is investigated. Three Walker circulations with potential relevance to East African

This study provides a holistic view of the coupled ocean-atmosphere-sea ice processes responsible for generating interannual variability in sea ice coverage in the Sea of Okhotsk as well as the atmospheric response to this variability. Simulations from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble project are analyzed, providing the ability to elucidate the time evolution of these relationships through

The relative contributions of ocean modes to the JJA and DJF land precipitation variabilities during 1934–2015 are investigated using a variety of statistical and dynamical system methods, i.e., singular value decomposition (SVD), multivariate linear regression, and information flow analysis. Through SVD analysis for the tropical land precipitation and sea surface temperature (SST), three ocean modes

The effect of atmospheric circulation on monthly, seasonal and annual mean surface air temperature trends in the years 1979–2018 is studied by applying a trajectory-based method on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA5 reanalysis data. To the extent that the method captures the effects of atmospheric circulation, the results suggest that circulation trends only had a minor impact

Combining data from Argo and the TAO buoy array we present new observations of variability in the Pacific Ocean. Argo profiles reveal the development of a thickness anomaly in the lower levels of the ventilated thermocline of the South Pacific in 2010. Data through 2017 show this anomaly propagating as a baroclinic wave westward and towards the equator. Theory suggests that this wave will reduce the