Interannual variation of the Asian-Pacific oscillation

Abstract

Previous studies have identified an Asian-Pacific Oscillation (APO) teleconnection pattern, which exhibits an out-of-phase relationship in the summer tropospheric temperature with warming over the Eurasia and cooling over the Northern Pacific and the Northern America, and vice versa. But the interannual variation of this teleconnection remains obscure. This study points out that interannual variation of the APO teleconnection is associated with the second empirical orthogonal function (EOF) mode of the northern-hemisphere upper tropospheric temperature during boreal summer, which accounts for 14% of the variance. A heat budget analysis is conducted for the Eurasian region and the North Pacific region respectively to reveal the cause of the zonal dipole mode temperature structure. For the Eurasia region, the warming is contributed by the adiabatic heating process due to downward vertical motion anomalies. For the Northern Pacific region, the temperature variation is mainly contributed by zonal advection associated with interannual zonal wind perturbation acting on the climatological temperature gradient. Composite analysis and numerical experiments with an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) shows the interannual zonal wind perturbation is related to the sea surface temperature anomalies over the equatorial eastern Pacific.