Contributions of oceanic and continental AAM to interannual variation in ΔLOD with the detection of 2020–2021 La Nina event

Abstract

As a strong climate element on interannual scales, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a major component of global weather and climate change, and it is also closely related to the interannual atmospheric angular momentum (AAM) and length-of-day changes (ΔLOD). Here, we reprocess and compare the interannual variations of AAM, ΔLOD with ENSO indices, with AAM mass and motion terms calculated over land separately from those over the ocean. Three oscillatory components (at ~ 6, ~ 7, ~ 8 years), due to angular momentum changes in Earth's interior, are removed to obtain the interannual ΔLOD solely related to climatic variations. Our results show that the AAM motion term over the ocean contributes the most to interannual ΔLOD, and that the oceanic AAM has larger variability than that over land, especially during the periods of strong ENSO events. After subtracting contributions associated with interior processes, the interannual ΔLOD anomalies corresponding to extreme ENSO events (1982–1983 ~ 0.43, 1997–1998 ~ 0.36, 2015–2016 ~ 0.42 ms) are about half as strong as those found in previous studies (~ 0.91, ~ 0.76, ~ 0.81 ms). Furthermore, we detect an intermediate La Nina event that occurred from August 2020 to May 2021, forcing the interannual ΔLOD to a minimum value of approximately -0.21 ms.