Improving the Prediction of the Summer Asian–Pacific Oscillation Using the Interannual Increment Approach

Abstract

Abstract The summer Asian–Pacific oscillation (APO) is a dominant teleconnection pattern over the extratropical Northern Hemisphere that links the large-scale atmospheric circulation anomalies over the Asian–North Pacific Ocean sector. In this study, the direct Development of a European Multimodel Ensemble System for Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction (DEMETER) model outputs from 1960 to 2001, which are limited in predicting the interannual variability of the summer Asian upper-tropospheric temperature and the decadal variations, are applied using the interannual increment approach to improve the predictions of the summer APO. By treating the year-to-year increment as the predictand, the interannual increment scheme is shown to significantly improve the predictive ability for the interannual variability of the summer Asian upper-tropospheric temperature and the decadal variations. The improvements for the interannual and interdecadal summer APO variability predictions in the interannual increment scheme relative to the original scheme are clear and significant. Compared with the DEMETER direct outputs, the statistical model with two predictors of APO and sea surface temperature anomaly over the Atlantic shows a significantly improved ability to predict the interannual variability of the summer rainfall over the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River valley (SRYR). This study therefore describes a more efficient approach for predicting the APO and the SRYR.