El Niño events are characterized by surface warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean and weakening of equatorial trade winds that occur every few years. Such conditions are accompanied by changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation, affecting global climate, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, fisheries and human activities. The alternation of warm El Niño and cold La Niña conditions, referred to as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), represents the strongest year-to-year fluctuation of the global climate system. Here we provide a synopsis of our current understanding of the spatio-temporal complexity of this important climate mode and its influence on the Earth system.

Many climate models struggle with a poor simulation of the Madden‐Julian Oscillation (MJO), especially its propagation across the Maritime Continent (MC). This study quantitatively evaluates the robustness of MJO propagation over the MC in climate models that participated in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) and Phase 6 (CMIP6) with a newly developed MC propagation metric. The results show that the CMIP6 models simulate MJO propagation over the MC more realistically than the CMIP5 models. Lower free‐tropospheric moisture budget analysis highlights that the greater horizontal moisture advection is responsible for the enhanced MJO propagation over the MC. The increase in horizontal moisture advection in the CMIP6 models is mainly attributed to the steeper horizontal mean state moisture gradient around the MC, which is associated with the reduction of the equatorial dry bias.

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This study assesses the skill of boreal winter Arctic Oscillation (AO) predictions with state-of-the-art dynamical ensemble prediction systems (EPSs): GloSea4, CFSv2, GEOS-5, CanCM3, CanCM4, and CM2.1. Long-term reforecasts with the EPSs are used to evaluate how well they represent the AO and to assess the skill of both deterministic and probabilistic forecasts of the AO. The reforecasts reproduce the observed changes in the large-scale patterns of the Northern Hemispheric surface temperature, upper level wind, and precipitation associated with the different phases of the AO. The results demonstrate that most EPSs improve upon persistence skill scores for lead times up to 2 months in boreal winter, suggesting some potential for skillful prediction of the AO and its associated climate anomalies at seasonal time scales. It is also found that the skill of AO forecasts during the recent period (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)) is higher than that of the earlier period (1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996).

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