Annual Seminar 2019

Teleconnections associated with ENSO variability have long been recognised as the major source of seasonal predictability for many regions in both the tropics and extratropics. However, in recent years the importance of teleconnections originated outside the "core" ENSO region have been increasingly recognised. On the seasonal scale, the ENSO teleconnections appear to be modulated by anomalies in the tropical Indian and Atlantic oceans; on the subseasonal scale, teleconnections from the Madden-Julian Oscillation have been shown to affect the occurrence of flow regimes in the North Atlantic.

The talk will review evidence on the impact of these teleconnections, with particular attention to anomalies originated from the Indian Ocean. It will be shown that Indian Ocean - North Atlantic teleconnections have common features when studied at sub-seasonal, seasonal and decadal time scale; a possible dynamical mechanism will be discussed, and results on the ability of European state-of-the-art coupled models to simulate these teleconnections will be presented.