Journal article
The ENSO-Australian rainfall teleconnection in reanalysis and CMIP5
Andrew D King, Markus G Donat, Lisa V Alexander, David J Karoly
CLIMATE DYNAMICS | SPRINGER | Published : 2015
Abstract
Australian rainfall is strongly influenced by El Niño-southern oscillation (ENSO). The relationship between ENSO and rainfall in eastern Australia is non-linear; the magnitude of La Niña events has a greater effect on rainfall than does the magnitude of El Niño events, and the cause of the non-linearity is unclear from previous work. The twentieth century reanalysis succeeds in capturing the asymmetric ENSO-rainfall relationship. In the reanalysis the asymmetry is strongly related to moisture availability in the south-west Pacific whereas wind flow is of less importance. Some global climate models (GCMs) in the coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP5) archive capture the asymmetric natu..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Steve Woolnough and an anonymous reviewer for their useful feedback on this paper. We also thank Jaclyn Brown for useful discussions. Funding for this project was provided by Australian Research Council grant CE110001028. We thank the Bureau of Meteorology, the Bureau of Rural Sciences, and CSIRO for providing the Australian Water Availability Project data. Twentieth Century Reanalysis data were provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA. Support for the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (DOE INCITE) program, and Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office. HadISST SSTs were provided by the U.K. Met Office. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 1 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.