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Reexamining the relationship of La Niña and the East Asian Winter Monsoon

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Abstract

The northern and the southern modes are two distinct principle modes that dominate the winter mean surface air temperature (Ts) variations over East Asia (EA). The cold southern mode is represented by a significant cooling south of 45°N and is linked to La Niña events. An objective criterion, which could distinguish the spatial distributions and the maximum center of sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA), is used to classify the La Niña events into two categories: mega-La Niña and equatorial La Niña. Their impacts are inspected onto the Ts southern mode. The mega-La Niña, featured by a significant K-shape warming in the western Pacific with the maximum SSTA cooling centered in the tropical central Pacific. As a response, an anomalous barotropic high is generated over North Pacific (NP) implying a weak zonal gradient between ocean and the EA continent, which induces a neutral Ts southern mode. The equatorial La Niña characterizes a significant cooling in the tropical eastern Pacific with convective descending motions shifting eastward to the east of the dateline. The resultant low-level circulation anomalies show an anomalous subtropical NP low and a gigantic abnormal EA continent high. The strong zonal gradient results in significant northerly anomalies over EA from 55°N to southeastern China. Over the mid-upper troposphere, the anomalous subtropical NP low extends westward to the Korean Peninsula, leading to a strengthened and southward shifted EA trough. Such abnormal circulation patterns favor the intrusion of cold air to southern EA and correspond to a strong Ts southern mode. The numerical results well validate the above processes and physical mechanisms.

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Acknowledgements

This work is jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 41790475), the National Key Research & Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0601801), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant Nos. 2015CB953904 and 2015CB453201) and the NSFC (Grant Nos. 91637312, 41575075 and 91437216).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Institute of Atmospheric Sciences, Fudan University, 2005 Songhu RD, Yangpu, Shanghai, 200438, China

    Peng Zhang & Zhiwei Wu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, 100029, China

    Peng Zhang

  3. Laboratory for Regional Oceanography and Numerical Modeling, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266237, China

    Jian** Li

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Correspondence to Zhiwei Wu.

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Zhang, P., Wu, Z. & Li, J. Reexamining the relationship of La Niña and the East Asian Winter Monsoon. Clim Dyn 53, 779–791 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-019-04613-7

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