Fan (2007) recently documented the zonal asymmetry of the Antarctic oscillation (AAO) in the austral winter. In this research, the zonal asymmetry of the northern annular mode, or the Arctic oscillation (AO), in the interannual variability is studied for the boreal winter. It is shown that there is zonal asymmetry of the AO as well, similar to the case of the Antarctic oscillation (AAO). However, the zonal asymmetry of the AO is considerably weaker than that of the AAO. This is far beyond the speculation, since the zonal asymmetry of the geography is larger in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere. The Western and Eastern Hemispheres portions of the AO are correlated at 0.54 for 1959― 1998, comparing with 0.23 for the case of the AAO. The authors also discussed the physical reason for this inter-hemispheric difference, and partly attributed it to the El Nio and Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle which may be represented by the SO index. It is indicated that the SO associated sea-level pressure (SLP) patterns are more zonal symmetric in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere.
In this paper, the impacts of the atmospheric circulation during boreal winter-spring on the western North Pacific (WNP) typhoon frequency (WNPTF) are studied. Several new factors in winter-spring in- fluencing the typhoon frequency were identified, including the sea ice cover in the North Pacific and the North Pacific oscillation. Based on these results, the multi-linear regression was applied to establishing a new forecast model for the typhoon frequency by using the datasets of 1965―1999. The forecast model shows a high correlation coefficient (0.79) between the model simulated and the actual typhoon frequencies in the period of 1965―1999. The forecast model also exhibits reasonable hindcasts for the typhoon frequencies for the years 2000―2006. Therefore, this work demonstrates that the new pre- dictors are significant for the prediction of the interannual variability of the WNPTF, which could be potentially used in the operational seasonal forecast of the typhoon frequency in the WNP to get a more physically based operational prediction model and higher forecast skill.
A regressive correction method is presented with the primary goal of improving ENSO simulation in regional coupled GCM. It focuses on the correction of ocean-atmosphere exchanged fluxes. On the basis of numerical experiments and analysis, the method can be described as follows: first, driving the ocean model with heat and momentum flux computed from a long-term observation data set; the pro-duced SST is then applied to force the AGCM as its boundary condition; after that the AGCM’s simula-tion and the corresponding observation can be correlated by a linear regressive formula. Thus the re-gressive correction coefficients for the simulation with spatial and temporal variation could be obtained by linear fitting. Finally the coefficients are applied to redressing the variables used for the calculation of the exchanged air-sea flux in the coupled model when it starts integration. This method together with the anomaly coupling method is tested in a regional coupled model, which is composed of a global grid-point atmospheric general circulation model and a high-resolution tropical Pacific Ocean model. The comparison of the results shows that it is superior to the anomaly coupling both in reducing the coupled model ‘climate drift’ and in improving the ENSO simulation in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
FU WeiWei1 & ZHOU GuangQing2 1 Nansen-Zhu International Research Center (NZC), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing 100029, China
Observations show that the tropical E1 Nifio-Southern Oscillation （ENSO） variability, after removing both the long term trend and decadal change of the background climate, has been enhanced by as much as 60% during the past 50 years. This shift in ENSO amplitude can be related to mean state changes in global climate. Past global warming has caused a weakening of the Walker circulation over the equatorial Indo-Pacific oceans, as well as a weakening of the trade winds and a reduction in the equatorial upwelling. These changes in tropical climatology play as stabilizing factors of the tropical coupling system. However, the shallower and strengthening thermocline in the equatorial Pacific increases the SST sensitivity to thermocline and wind stress variabilities and tend to destabilize the tropical coupling system. Observations suggest that the destabilizing factors, such as the strengthening thermocline, may have overwhelmed the stabilizing effects of the atmosphere, and played a deterministic role in the enhanced ENSO variability, at least during the past half century. This is different from the recent assessment of IPCC-AR4 coupled models.
