• Login
    About WHOAS
    View Item 
    •   WHOAS Home
    • Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
    • Physical Oceanography (PO)
    • View Item
    •   WHOAS Home
    • Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
    • Physical Oceanography (PO)
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of WHOASCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesKeywordsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesKeywords

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    Can Australian multiyear droughts and wet spells be generated in the absence of oceanic variability?

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    jcli-d-15-0694%2E1.pdf (2.320Mb)
    Date
    2016-08-19
    Author
    Taschetto, Andrea S.  Concept link
    Sen Gupta, Alexander  Concept link
    Ummenhofer, Caroline C.  Concept link
    England, Matthew H.  Concept link
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Citable URI
    https://hdl.handle.net/1912/8453
    As published
    https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0694.1
    DOI
    10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0694.1
    Keyword
     Circulation/ Dynamics; Atmosphere-ocean interaction; Atm/Ocean Structure/ Phenomena; Drought; Precipitation; Physical Meteorology and Climatology; Climate variability; Forecasting; Climate prediction; Variability 
    Abstract
    Anomalous conditions in the tropical oceans, such as those related to El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean dipole, have been previously blamed for extended droughts and wet periods in Australia. Yet the extent to which Australian wet and dry spells can be driven by internal atmospheric variability remains unclear. Natural variability experiments are examined to determine whether prolonged extreme wet and dry periods can arise from internal atmospheric and land variability alone. Results reveal that this is indeed the case; however, these dry and wet events are found to be less severe than in simulations incorporating coupled oceanic variability. Overall, ocean feedback processes increase the magnitude of Australian rainfall variability by about 30% and give rise to more spatially coherent rainfall impacts. Over mainland Australia, ocean interactions lead to more frequent extreme events, particularly during the rainy season. Over Tasmania, in contrast, ocean–atmosphere coupling increases mean rainfall throughout the year. While ocean variability makes Australian rainfall anomalies more severe, droughts and wet spells of duration longer than three years are equally likely to occur in both atmospheric- and ocean-driven simulations. Moreover, they are essentially indistinguishable from what one expects from a Gaussian white noise distribution. Internal atmosphere–land-driven megadroughts and megapluvials that last as long as ocean-driven events are also identified in the simulations. This suggests that oceanic variability may be less important than previously assumed for the long-term persistence of Australian rainfall anomalies. This poses a challenge to accurate prediction of long-term dry and wet spells for Australia.
    Description
    Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Climate 29 (2016): 6201-6221, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0694.1.
    Collections
    • Physical Oceanography (PO)
    Suggested Citation
    Journal of Climate 29 (2016): 6201-6221
     

    Related items

    Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

    • Thumbnail

      Climate variability, volcanic forcing, and last millennium hydroclimate extremes 

      Stevenson, Samantha; Overpeck, Jonathan T.; Fasullo, John T.; Coats, Sloan; Parsons, Luke A.; Otto-Bliesner, Bette; Ault, Toby; Loope, Garrison; Cole, Julia (American Meteorological Society, 2018-05-03)
      Multidecadal hydroclimate variability has been expressed as “megadroughts” (dry periods more severe and prolonged than observed over the twentieth century) and corresponding “megapluvial” wet periods in many regions around ...
    • Thumbnail

      Paleoclimate constraints on the spatiotemporal character of past and future droughts 

      Coats, Sloan; Smerdon, Jason E.; Stevenson, Samantha; Fasullo, John T.; Otto-Bliesner, Bette; Ault, Toby (American Meteorological Society, 2020-10-15)
      Machine-learning-based methods that identify drought in three-dimensional space–time are applied to climate model simulations and tree-ring-based reconstructions of hydroclimate over the Northern Hemisphere extratropics ...
    • Thumbnail

      Wintertime atmospheric response to North Atlantic Ocean circulation variability in a climate model 

      Frankignoul, Claude; Gastineau, Guillaume; Kwon, Young-Oh (American Meteorological Society, 2015-10-01)
      Maximum covariance analysis of a preindustrial control simulation of the NCAR Community Climate System Model, version 4 (CCSM4), shows that a barotropic signal in winter broadly resembling a negative phase of the North ...
    All Items in WHOAS are protected by original copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. WHOAS also supports the use of the Creative Commons licenses for original content.
    A service of the MBLWHOI Library | About WHOAS
    Contact Us | Send Feedback | Privacy Policy
    Core Trust Logo