Subseasonal Variation in the Winter ENSO-NAO Relationship and the Modulation of Tropical North Atlantic SST Variability

• Published in: Climate
• Main Authors: Wenjun Zhang, Feng Jiang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2023
• Subjects: ENSO; NAO; subseasonal change; Science; Q; Pacific; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11020047; https://doaj.org/article/22fb5c1ae40c4796b05cc57cf9cf47ae

The impact of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has been controversially discussed for several decades, which exhibits prominent seasonality and nonstationarity. During early winter, there appears a positive ENSO-NAO relationship, while this relationship reverses its sign in late winter. Here, we show that this subseasonal variation in the ENSO-NAO relationship could be attributed to the different mechanisms involved in early and late winters. In early winter, the positive linkage between the ENSO and NAO could be simply understood as resulting from the changes in tropical Walker circulation and the associated atmospheric meridional circulation over the North Atlantic. In the following late winter, an opposite NAO-like response appears as the large-scale Pacific–North Atlantic teleconnection pattern fully establishes and evident sea surface temperature anomalies occur over the North Tropical Atlantic (NTA). We further show that the phase shift in NAO during ENSO late winter is largely contributed by the establishment of the ENSO-associated NTA SST anomaly via its excited convection in the subtropical Atlantic. The competing roles of mechanisms explain the subseasonal variation in the ENSO-NAO relationship from early to late winter, providing useful information for seasonal prediction over the North Atlantic–European region.