Simon Grainger

The role of external forcing in prolonged trends in Australian rainfall

Based on model output from a multi-model ensemble (MME) of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, it is shown that prolonged trends in Australian rainfall over the southwest during winter and the monsoonal northwest during summer are associated with trends in the large scale Southern Hemisphere circulation. These trends, in turn, are the result of external radiative forcing, including anthropogenic greenhouse gases, ozone, aerosols and land use change. The MME is used in an analysis of covariance method to separate the internal (natural) variability in the coupled rainfall-atmospheric circulation relationship from influences associated with anomalous external radiative forcing. In both seasons, the leading coupled external mode (singular vector) in the twentieth century runs has rainfall and circulation loading patterns with associated time-series that have statistically significant trends. The associated rainfall loading patterns qualitatively resemble the patterns of observed rainfall trends. The circulation loading patterns reflect the thermal expansion of the tropics and the Hadley Cell. A comparison between similar analyses using the second half of the twenty-first century of the representative concentration pathways (RCP) RCP8.5 and RCP4.5 scenarios show that trends in rainfall and the circulation are projected to continue and intensify under increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. The technique developed here is generally applicable to separate the climate change signal from natural variability in any relevant pair of coupled climate fields.

Teleconnections and predictive characteristics of Australian seasonal rainfall

A new methodology is proposed that allows patterns of interannual covariability, or teleconnections, between the intraseasonal and slow components of seasonal mean Australian rainfall and the corresponding components in the Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation to be estimated. In all seasons, the dominant rainfall–circulation teleconnections in the intraseasonal component are shown to have the characteristic features associated with well-known intraseasonal dynamical and statistical atmospheric modes and their relationship with rainfall. Thus, for example, there are patterns of interannual covariability that reflect rainfall relationships with the intraseasonal Southern Annular Mode, the Madden-Julian Oscillation and wavenumber 3 and 4 intraseasonal modes of variability. The predictive characteristics of the atmospheric circulation–rainfall relationship are shown to reside with the slow components. In all seasons, we find rainfall–circulation teleconnections in the slow components related to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Each season also has a coupled mode, with a statistically significant trend in the time series of the atmospheric component that appears to be related to recent observed trends in rainfall. The slow Southern Annular Mode also features in association with southern Australian rainfall, especially during austral winter and spring. There is also evidence of an influence of Indian Ocean sea surface temperature variability on rainfall in southeast Australia during austral winter and spring.

Assessment of Modes of Interannual Variability of Southern Hemisphere Atmospheric Circulation in CMIP5 Models

AbstractAn assessment is made of the modes of interannual variability in the seasonal mean summer and winter Southern Hemisphere (SH) 500-hPa geopotential height in the twentieth century in models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) phase 5 (CMIP5) dataset. Modes of variability of both the slow (signal) and intraseasonal (noise) components in the CMIP5 models are evaluated against those estimated from reanalysis data. There is general improvement in the leading modes of the slow (signal) component in CMIP5 models compared with the CMIP phase 3 (CMIP3) dataset. The largest improvement is in the spatial structures of the modes related to El Nino–Southern Oscillation variability in SH summer. An overall score metric is significantly higher for CMIP5 over CMIP3 in both seasons. The leading modes in the intraseasonal noise component are generally well reproduced in CMIP5 models, and there are few differences from CMIP3. A new total overall score metric is used to rank the CMIP5 models over bo...

Interannual modes of variability of Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation in CMIP3 models

The atmospheric circulation acts as a bridge between large-scale sources of climate variability, and climate variability on regional scales. Here a statistical method is applied to monthly mean Southern Hemisphere 500hPa geopotential height to separate the interannual variability of the seasonal mean into intraseasonal and slowly varying (time scales of a season or longer) components. Intraseasonal and slow modes of variability are estimated from realisations of models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 (CMIP3) twentieth century coupled climate simulation (20c3m) and are evaluated against those estimated from reanalysis data. The intraseasonal modes of variability are generally well reproduced across all CMIP3 20c3m models for both Southern Hemisphere summer and winter. The slow modes are in general less well reproduced than the intraseasonal modes, and there are larger differences between realisations than for the intraseasonal modes. New diagnostics are proposed to evaluate model variability. It is found that differences between realisations from each model are generally less than inter-model differences. Differences between model-mean diagnostics are found. The results obtained are applicable to assessing the reliability of changes in atmospheric circulation variability in CMIP3 models and for their suitability for further studies of regional climate variability.

Simulated decadal modes of the NH atmospheric circulation arising from intra-decadal variability, external forcing and slow-decadal climate processes

A decadal variance decomposition method is applied to the Northern Hemisphere (NH) 500-hPa geopotential height (GPH) and the sea level pressure (SLP) taken from the last millennium (850–1850 AD) experiment with the coupled climate model CCSM4, to estimate the contribution of the intra-decadal variability to the inter-decadal variability. By removing the intra-decadal variability from the total inter-decadal variability, the residual variability is more likely to be associated with slowly varying external forcings and slow-decadal climate processes, and therefore is referred to as slow-decadal variability. The results show that the (multi-)decadal changes of the NH 500-hPa GPH are primarily dominated by slow-decadal variability, whereas the NH SLP field is primarily dominated by the intra-decadal variability. At both pressure levels, the leading intra-decadal modes each have features related to the El Niño–southern oscillation, the intra-decadal variability of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) and the Arctic oscillation (AO); while the leading slow-decadal modes are associated with external radiative forcing (mostly with volcanic aerosol loadings), the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation and the slow-decadal variability of AO and PDO. Moreover, the radiative forcing has much weaker effect to the SLP than that to the 500-hPa GPH.