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Relationship Between Ural–Siberian Blocking and the East Asian Winter Monsoon in Relation to the Arctic Oscillation and the El Nin˜ O–Southern Oscillation

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Relationship Between Ural–Siberian Blocking and the East Asian Winter Monsoon in Relation to the Arctic Oscillation and the El Nin˜ O–Southern Oscillation 4242 JOURNAL OF CLIMATE VOLUME 25 Relationship between Ural–Siberian Blocking and the East Asian Winter Monsoon in Relation to the Arctic Oscillation and the El Nin˜ o–Southern Oscillation HO NAM CHEUNG AND WEN ZHOU Guy Carpenter Asia–Pacific Climate Impact Center, School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China HING YIM MOK AND MAN CHI WU Hong Kong Observatory, Hong Kong, China (Manuscript received 7 April 2011, in final form 14 December 2011) ABSTRACT This study attempts to assess the possible linkage between Ural–Siberian blocking and the East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM). During the boreal winter, the dominance of blocking thermally enhances cold advection downstream. The frequent occurrence of Ural–Siberian blocking potentially promotes a cold EAWM and vice versa. The seasonal blocking activity can be regarded as the combined effect of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the El Nin˜ o–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Weakened (strengthened) meridional flow in the positive (negative) phase of the AO is unfavorable (favorable) for the formation of blocking highs. Because the AO shows a close relationship with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), its teleconnection with Ural–Siberian blocking may exist in the form of an eastward-propagating wave train. Be that as it may, the wave train signal across East Asia may be disturbed by the external effect of a strong ENSO event, which probably enhances (weakens) the westerlies near Siberia in its warm (cold) phase. Consequently, the blocking–EAWM relationship is stronger (weaker) when the AO and ENSO are in phase (out of phase). If both AO and ENSO attain the positive (negative) phase, the Siberian high tends to be weaker (stronger) and the temperature tends to be higher (lower) in East Asia, with less (more) Ural–Siberian blocking. On the other hand, if they are out of phase, they are not strongly linked to the intensity of the Siberian high, and the blocking activity over Ural–Siberia is unclear. 1. Introduction (2005b) studied the impact of blocking highs on cold surges by classifying them based on their origin in the Atmospheric blocking (‘‘blocking’’) is made up of an- Atlantic or Pacific. The Atlantic group includes the highs ticyclonic and cyclonic vortices. Its dominance over the over the Eurasian continent, which is often regarded as extratropics characterizes a strong meridional-type flow a wave train signal propagating from the North Atlantic (Rex 1950) and promotes the advection of polar air Ocean (e.g., Joung and Hitchman 1982). The Pacific masses along its downstream cyclonic component. When group, on the other hand, refers to a quasi-stationary a blocking high is located upstream adjacent to Siberia blocking high over the North Pacific, which may exert an in the boreal winter, the enhanced northerly cold ad- influence on the East Asian trough and indirectly affect vection increases mass convergence in the upper tropo- the cold surge pathways in East Asia. No matter how sphere, which in turn intensifies the surface Siberian high strong the blocking high is, the Siberian high undergoes and triggers a cold air outbreak in East Asia (Ding 1990). substantial intensification only if there are preexisting This provides a fundamental linkage between the block- cold anomalies (Takaya and Nakamura 2005a). There- ing and the East Asian cold surge. Takaya and Nakamura fore, the Pacific group has a relatively less significant im- pact on the cold surges, and the focus of this study is on the blocking upstream of Siberia. Corresponding author address: Dr. Wen Zhou, Guy Carpenter Asia-Pacific Climate Impact Center, School of Energy and Envi- While strong blocking events were found to play a cru- ronment, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. cial role in reinforcing severe cold surges in East Asia (e.g., E-mail: [email protected] Joung and Hitchman 1982; Takaya and Nakamura 2005a; DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00225.1 Ó 2012 American Meteorological Society Unauthenticated | Downloaded 09/23/21 09:34 PM UTC 15 JUNE 2012 C H E U N G E T A L . 4243 Lu and Chang 2009), the frequent occurrence of Ural– North Pacific are higher (lower). As warmer (cooler) SSTs Siberian blocking was found to be the main contributor in La Nin˜a(ElNin˜o) years enhance (suppress) the con- to two prolonged cold periods in the 2000s, which hap- vection that drives the meridional circulation in East Asia, pened in February–March 2005 (Lu and Chang 2009) the ENSO may remotely control the sinking motion over and January 2008 (Zhou et al. 2009). In particular, the Siberia. 2008 episode combined with plentiful southwesterly Whereas the EAWM is dynamically connected with moisture transported from the Bay of Bengal and a strong blocking, it is teleconnected with the AO and ENSO. La Nin˜a event, resulting in freezing rain and snowstorms Thus, it raises the question of how the two climate fac- that lasted for three weeks in southern China (Wen et al. tors exert an impact on the relationship between Ural– 2009; Zhou et al. 2009). On the other hand, a lower fre- Siberian blocking and the EAWM. In addition, El Nin˜ o quency of Ural–Siberian blocking probably results in occurred more frequently in the positive phase of the a warmer East Asian winter climate. Wu and Leung Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) from the middle 1970s (2009) showed that the longest cold spell in Hong Kong, to the 1990s (Mantua et al. 1997; X. Wang et al. 2009). a coastal city in southern China, tends to be shorter in What are the consequences of the increasing frequency a winter without a Eurasian blocking event, such that the of El Nin˜ o events and the positive phase of the AO? winter gets warmer. Moreover, the winter-mean inten- This paper is organized as follows. Data and methods sity of the Siberian high has been found to be directly are presented in section 2. Next, the two major geo- proportional to seasonal blocking activity over Ural– potential height modes over the Ural–Siberian region Siberia (L. Wang et al. 2010). As the Siberian high is a and their associated impacts on Ural–Siberian blocking semipermanent feature of the East Asian winter mon- and the EAWM are introduced in section 3. Further soon (EAWM; e.g., Lau and Li 1984), a linkage appar- analyses consider the role of the AO and ENSO. Sec- ently exists between Ural–Siberian blocking and the tions 4 and 5 make the comparison between different EAWM. polarities of the AO and the ENSO, respectively, whereas The EAWM is the most energetic global monsoon section 6 concerns their combined effect. The results are system, involving interaction between the extratropics discussed and summarized in section 7. of the East Asian continent and the tropics of the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, an accurate forecast of the EAWM should consider climate factors from both sources. On 2. Data and methods one hand, climate variability over the extratropical re- a. Data gion can be captured by the Arctic Oscillation (AO; Thompson and Wallace 1998). On interannual time scales, The winter period covers the five consecutive months Gong et al. (2001) showed that it is negatively correlated from November through March (NDJFM) for the with the intensity of the Siberian high such that the AO 60 years from 1950 to 2009, where year 1950 represents mayexertanimpactontheEAWM(GongandHo2002). the five months from November 1950 to March 1951, After the climate shift in the middle 1970s, the stronger and so on. The 60 years of data were extracted from the polar westerlies under the predominantly positive phase National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National of the AO could have been a major factor responsible Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP–NCAR) 2.58 for the weakening trend of the Siberian high (Gong latitude by 2.58 longitude gridded reanalysis datasets and Ho 2002). On the other hand, the El Nin˜ o–Southern (Kalnay et al. 1996). The raw data include monthly fields Oscillation (ENSO) plays a major role in interannual of temperature T, sea level pressure (SLP), geopotential climate variability over the tropical Pacific Ocean. The height Z,zonalwindU, and meridional wind V. In par- significant impact associated with a strong El Nin˜ o event ticular, daily fields of geopotential height at 500 hPa in 1982/83 (Quiroz 1983) motivated extensive work fo- (Z500) were also extracted for detecting blocking events. cusing on its impact on global climate. Previous re- Furthermore, the AO index and the ENSO index (SST searchers have provided evidence for the tendency of anomalies over the Nin˜o-3.4 region) were freely adopted the EAWM to be weak in El Nin˜ o years (e.g., Li 1990; from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) website (http:// Zhang et al. 1997). Li (1990) suggested that the Ferrel www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/). cell is activated by the active Hadley cell in El Nin˜ o For standardizing the raw data, the following normal- years such that the strong westerlies near the surface izing procedure is performed. Normalizing daily data for inhibit the intensification of the Siberian high. Chen acalendardayx uses the 11-day samples from day x 2 5 et al. (2000) further showed that the EAWM tends to be to x 1 5 for the entire 60-yr study period (i.e., 660 data stronger (weaker) in La Nin˜ a(ElNin˜ o) years when points), while normalizing monthly data for a particular tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the western month uses all 60 samples from the same month (i.e., 60 Unauthenticated | Downloaded 09/23/21 09:34 PM UTC 4244 JOURNAL OF CLIMATE VOLUME 25 and 408N, respectively (Austin 1980; Tibaldi and Molteni 1990).
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