MJO-related China rainfall teleconnections in the MetUM

Abstract

During a Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) event, anomalous convection triggers a dynamical response with anomalous large-scale ascent and upper-tropospheric divergence outside the tropics creates interaction between the MJO and the extratropical weather, modes of global circulation and climate variability. The MJO is known to have an impact on China rainfall and regional circulation with enhanced/ suppressed rainfall in South China during the propagation of the MJO from the Indian Ocean into the western Pacific. As the MJO is considered a major source of predictability at subseasonal time scales, it is important to understand how climate models are representing the MJO and its remote effects. This study is aimed to investigate the modelled MJO and associated local effects in China precipitation using the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM). It was found that the response of the rainfall over South China is asymmetric, with the enhancement of rainfall during the Indian Ocean convective phases (phase 2) of the MJO being much stronger than the suppression during the west Pacific phases (phase 6). This response signal was mostly due to the increase in probability of extreme precipitation events rather than the increase in number of rainy days. Analysis of the modelled MJO and associated response shows, although the MJO is more realistically represented in the atmosphere-ocean coupled simulation, the atmosphere-only simulation showed more evidence of MJO-related remote effects in the rainfall patterns over China. The ocean-coupled simulation shows no significant response to the propagation of MJO-associated convection whereas the atmosphere-only simulation shows the correct pattern of enhancement and suppression of rainfall and associated regional circulation pattern changes. The differences found in the representation of remote effects between atmosphere-only and ocean-coupled simulations may be attributed to the air-sea interaction processes and to fundamentally different mean-state biases which affect not only the representation of the MJO but also the propagation of MJO-induced Rossby waves.