Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. 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 33(15), (2020): 6707-6730, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-19-0579.1.
Description:
The long-term trend of sea surface salinity (SSS) reveals an intensification of the global hydrological cycle due to human-induced climate change. This study demonstrates that SSS variability can also be used as a measure of terrestrial precipitation on interseasonal to interannual time scales, and to locate the source of moisture. Seasonal composites during El Niño–Southern Oscillation/Indian Ocean dipole (ENSO/IOD) events are used to understand the variations of moisture transport and precipitation over Australia, and their association with SSS variability. As ENSO/IOD events evolve, patterns of positive or negative SSS anomaly emerge in the Indo-Pacific warm pool region and are accompanied by atmospheric moisture transport anomalies toward Australia. During co-occurring La Niña and negative IOD events, salty anomalies around the Maritime Continent (north of Australia) indicate freshwater export and are associated with a significant moisture transport that converges over Australia to create anomalous wet conditions. In contrast, during co-occurring El Niño and positive IOD events, a moisture transport divergence anomaly over Australia results in anomalous dry conditions. The relationship between SSS and atmospheric moisture transport also holds for pure ENSO/IOD events but varies in magnitude and spatial pattern. The significant pattern correlation between the moisture flux divergence and SSS anomaly during the ENSO/IOD events highlights the associated ocean–atmosphere coupling. A case study of the extreme hydroclimatic events of Australia (e.g., the 2010/11 Brisbane flood) demonstrates that the changes in SSS occur before the peak of ENSO/IOD events. This raises the prospect that tracking of SSS variability could aid the prediction of Australian rainfall.
Description:
This research is funded through the Earth System and Climate Change Hub of the Australian government’s National Environmental Science Programme. The assistance of computing resources from the National Computational Infrastructure supported by the Australian Government is acknowledged. CCU acknowledges support from the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant OCE-1663704. MF was supported by the by Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR), which is a joint initiative between the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (QNLM), CSIRO, University of New South Wales and University of Tasmania. The authors wish to acknowledge PyFerret (https://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/Ferret/) and the Cimate Data Operators (https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo/) for the data analysis and graphical representations in this paper.
Keywords:
Atmosphere-ocean interaction
;
El Nino
;
Extreme events
;
La Nina
;
Precipitation
;
Salinity
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
