ENSO Teleconnection Pattern Changes over the Southeastern United States under a Climate Change Scenario in CMIP5 Models

Abstract

A strong teleconnection exists between the sea surface temperature (SST) over the tropical Pacific and the winter precipitation in the southeastern United States (SE US). This feature is adopted to validate the fidelity of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) in this study. In addition, the authors examine whether the teleconnection pattern persists in the future under a global warming scenario. Generally, most of the eight selected models show a positive correlation between November SST over Niño 3 region and December–February (DJF) mean daily precipitation anomalies over the SE US, consistent with the observation. However, the models with poor realization of skewness of Niño indices fail to simulate the realistic teleconnection pattern in the historical simulation. In the Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 (RCP8.5) run, all of the models maintain positive and slightly increased correlation patterns. It is noteworthy that the region with strong teleconnection pattern shifts northward in the future. Increased variance of winter precipitation due to the SST teleconnection is shown over Alabama and Georgia rather than over Florida under the RCP8.5 scenario in most of the models, differing from the historical run in which the precipitation in Florida is the most attributable to the eastern Pacific SST.