Influences of large scale circulation and atmospheric rivers on US winter precipitation beyond ENSO

Abstract

Abstract This study aims to understand the underlying mechanism of large scale circulation control on atmospheric rivers (AR) and precipitation variability across the Contiguous United States (CONUS) in winter. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), known as a key driver of global circulation, has shown a modest impact on CONUS precipitation, prompting us to focus our attention on other climate drivers. Here, we find that barotropic instability over the exit region of the North Pacific subtropical jet stream plays a critical role in forming a downstream stationary Rossby wave train during winter (referred to as the West Mode). This wave pattern influences CONUS precipitation by affecting AR activity and explains approximately 50% of rainfall changes in the Western US, as well as numerous extreme wet and drought years along the West Coast, such as the wet winter in 2022/23. Over the past eight decades, the West Mode exhibited limited sensitivity to both Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and increasing anthropogenic forcing and was more influential in shaping interannual and interdecadal CONUS precipitation variability than ENSO. This result may explain why ENSO alone can only account for a limited portion of CONUS precipitation variability, thereby imposing an inherent constraint on the precision of seasonal predictions of CONUS precipitation made by climate models. Due to the significance of the West Mode in governing precipitation variability over the Western US, winter precipitation in that region may possess some resilience to the effects of global warming in the coming decades, as supported by large ensemble simulations driven by projected radiative forcing.