[A-CG33] Multi-scale ocean-atmosphere interaction in the tropics

[ACG33-07] ENSO's Interactions with Climate Modes Enhances Climate Predictability

★Invited Papers

*Fei-Fei Jin¹, Sen Zhao¹, Malte F Stuecker ¹, LiCheng Geng¹ (1.University of Hawaii at Manoa)

Keywords:ENSO, Climate Modes, ENSO-Climate Mode Interaction, Climate Predicatability

As the most prominent interannual predictable variability in Earth’s climate system, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon exerts widespread environmental and socioeconomic impacts by reorganizing global climate and weather conditions. ENSO establishes itself from coupled ocean-atmosphere interactions in the tropical Pacific; and its core dynamics are well understood by the simple Recharge Oscillator framework. Yet, numerous studies found various pathways for other modes of climate variability in the global oceans, especially those in the tropical ocean basins, to not only be influenced by ENSO but also exert great impacts on ENSO. Moreover, the interactions between ENSO and these climate modes have been suggested to be important sources for improving predictions for ENSO and these climate modes. We thus examine the roles of these interaction in a recent established extended nonlinear recharge oscillator model that incorporates both the core ENSO dynamics and its seasonally modulated interactions with other modes of variability in the global oceans. We found that these interactions can extend not only the predictability of other climate modes via ENSO’s influences, but also extend ENSO predictability effectively by harvesting the memories residing in each climate mode. As climate models are biased in capturing the oscillatory nature of ENSO, the correct persistency of the other climate modes, as well as their rich paths of interactions, our study demonstrates not only the fundamental sources of seasonal-to-interannual climate predictability, but also the necessity for climate models to capture the right dynamics of ENSO and all major climate modes as well as their interactions to reach the skill potentials in climate predictions.