Linear interference and the Northern Annular Mode response to tropical SST forcing: Sensitivity to model configuration

Abstract

AbstractInterannual variability in tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) associated with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is linked to teleconnections with the Northern Annular Mode (NAM). Previous work highlighted that the sign and amplitude of the NAM response to tropical SSTs are controlled by the total wave activity entering the subpolar stratosphere, which depends on the linear interference of planetary wave anomalies with the climatological stationary wave field. This study uses multiple configurations of atmospheric general circulation models to assess the robustness of these linkages to details of the tropical SST forcing and model configuration. Across 23 cases with idealized SST forcing, the amplitudes of the tropical and extratropical wave responses are found to scale approximately linearly with forcing strength. But wave amplitude alone is not sufficient to predict the NAM response. Instead, the spatial structure of the wave response (and hence the linear interference) provides the best explanation of the NAM response in all cases. Linear interference explains most of the total wave activity response even in cases with stronger nonlinear contributions, due to consistent cancellation between quasi‐stationary wave nonlinearity and nonlinearity arising from transient waves. Within this limited set of experiments, there is no evidence for a consistent sensitivity of the NAM response to horizontal resolution or to vertical resolution in the stratosphere. These findings reveal that linear interference provides a robust and reproducible mechanism linking midlatitude wave responses to zonal mean circulation (NAM) responses across a wide variety of forcing cases.