Meridional Displacement of the East Asian Upper-tropospheric Westerly Jet and Its Relationship with the East Asian Summer Rainfall in CMIP5 Simulations

Abstract

As the first leading mode of upper-tropospheric circulation in observations, the meridional displacement of the East Asian westerly jet (EAJ) varies closely with the East Asian rainfall in summer. In this study, the interannual variation of the EAJ meridional displacement and its relationship with the East Asian summer rainfall are evaluated, using the historical simulations of CMIP5 (phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project). The models can generally reproduce the meridional displacement of the EAJ, which is mainly manifested as the first principal mode in most of the simulations. For the relationship between the meridional displacement of the EAJ and East Asian rainfall, almost all the models depict a weaker correlation than observations and exhibit considerably large spread across the models. It is found that the discrepancy in the interannual relationship is closely related to the simulation of the climate mean state, including the climatological location of the westerly jet in Eurasia and rainfall bias in South Asia and the western North Pacific. In addition, a close relationship between the simulation discrepancy and intensity of EAJ variability is also found: the models with a stronger intensity of the EAJ meridional displacement tend to reproduce a closer interannual relationship, and vice versa.