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Regulation of the subseasonal variability of winter rainfall in South China by the diversity of El Niño Southern Oscillation

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Abstract

Winter precipitation over South China tends to increase with enhancement of the 10–30-day intraseasonal oscillation (ISO) during El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events from 1981 to 2017. This study shows that, in contrast with central Pacific El Niño and La Niña events, the 10–30-day ISO of rainfall particularly intensify during eastern Pacific (EP) El Niño events. The seasonal evolution of the anomalous circulation, indicated as the annual cycle (AC), bridges the slow-varying ENSO and the transient 10–30-day ISO of winter rainfall over South China. As to the AC component, the EP El Niño events not only enhance the Philippine Sea anticyclone to provide a wetter low-level background over South China, but develop the mid-latitude cyclone and westerly winds in the upper-level over East Asia by changing tropical convection. The moisture over South China further increases due to the low-level wind convergence on a 10–30-day timescale. In the upper troposphere, the AC component of the anomalous westerly redistributes the 10–30-day relative vorticity by modulating the subseasonal mid-latitude wave train to strengthen the positive vorticity advection and ascending motion over South China. Their collaboration amplifies the subseasonal variance of winter precipitation in situ. By contrast, the AC component of the upper level circulation at mid-latitudes is not well organized in other ENSO subsets, corresponding to their lack of influence on the ISO variability of rainfall over South China.

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Acknowledgements

This work was jointly funded by the the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41830969 and 41775052), National Key R&D Program (2018YFC1505904), the Basic Scientific Research and Operation Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences (CAMS) under grant 2018Z006, and the S&T Development Fund of CAMS (2019KJ008, 2020KJ012). This study was also supported by the Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Climate Change.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather and Institute of Climate System, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Bei**g, 100081, China

    Li Guo, Congwen Zhu & Boqi Liu

  2. College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, 100049, China

    Li Guo

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  1. Li Guo
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Correspondence to Congwen Zhu.

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Guo, L., Zhu, C. & Liu, B. Regulation of the subseasonal variability of winter rainfall in South China by the diversity of El Niño Southern Oscillation. Clim Dyn 56, 1919–1936 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05565-z

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