How Does El Niño Affect Predictability Barrier of Its Accompanied Positive Indian Ocean Dipole Event?

Abstract

The effects of El Niño on the predictability of positive Indian Ocean dipole (pIOD) events are investigated by using the GFDL CM2p1 coupled model from the perspective of error growth. The results show that, under the influence of El Niño, the summer predictability barrier (SPB) for pIOD tends to intensify and the winter predictability barrier (WPB) is weakened. Since the reason for the weakening of WPB has been explained in a previous study, the present study attempts to explore why the SPB is enhanced. The results demonstrate that the initial sea temperature errors, which are most likely to induce SPB for pIOD with El Niño, possess patterns similar to those for pIOD without El Niño, whose dominant errors concentrate in the tropical Pacific Ocean (PO), with a pattern of negative SST errors occurring in the eastern and central PO and subsurface sea temperature errors being negative in the eastern PO and positive in the western PO. By tracking the development of such initial errors, it is found that the initial errors over PO lead to anomalous westerlies in the southeastern Indian Ocean (IO) through the effect of double-cell Walker circulation. Such westerly anomalies are inhibited by the strongest climatological easterly wind and the southeasterlies related to the pIOD event itself in summer, while they are enhanced by El Niño. This competing effect causes the intensified seasonal variation in latent heat flux, with much less loss in summer under the effect of El Niño. The greater suppression of the loss of latent heat flux favors the positive sea surface temperature (SST) errors developing much faster in the eastern Indian Ocean in summer, and eventually induces an enhanced SPB for pIOD due to El Niño.