Impacts of ocean-atmosphere teleconnection patterns on the south-central United States

Abstract

Recent research has linked the climate variability associated with ocean-atmosphere teleconnections to impacts rippling throughout environmental, economic, and social systems. This research reviews recent literature through 2021 in which we identify linkages among the major modes of climate variability, in the form of ocean-atmosphere teleconnections, and the impacts to temperature and precipitation of the South-Central United States (SCUSA), consisting of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. The SCUSA is an important areal focus for this analysis because it straddles the ecotone between humid and arid climates in the United States and has a growing population, diverse ecosystems, robust agricultural and other economic sectors including the potential for substantial wind and solar energy generation. Whereas a need exists to understand atmospheric variability due to the cascading impacts through ecological and social systems, our understanding is complicated by the positioning of the SCUSA between subtropical and extratropical circulation features and the influence of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and the adjacent Gulf of Mexico. The Southern Oscillation (SO), Pacific-North American (PNA) pattern, North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the related Arctic Oscillation (AO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation/Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMO/AMV), and Pacific Decadal Oscillation/Pacific Decadal Variability (PDO/PDV) have been shown to be important modulators of temperature and precipitation variables at the monthly, seasonal, and interannual scales, and the intraseasonal Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) in the SCUSA. By reviewing these teleconnection impacts in the region alongside updated seasonal correlation maps, this research provides more accessible and comparable results for interdisciplinary use on climate impacts beyond the atmospheric-environmental sciences.

Changing features of the Northern Hemisphere 500-hPa circumpolar vortex

“…The lowest rate of 188 km 2 day −1 occurred over the 2001–2017 period, possibly corresponding to shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO; Newman et al, 2003 ) to a cold phase (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, 2021 ), which might partially offset the tendency for NHCPV expansion, particularly in the Pacific basin. Both of these hypotheses invite further investigation, but the time series is not sufficiently long to identify multiple cycles of influence from either the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (Kerr, 2000 ) or the PDO (Rohli et al, 2022 ). Note that because of the abrupt downward shift in area at the breakpoints, the minimum rate of areal growth in subperiods still exceeds the mean temporal increase over the entire time series.…”

Shortwave radiative flux variability through the lens of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation

“…The PDO is found to be related to atmospheric dynamics, specifically the Pacific North American pattern, and is strongly correlated with temperature and precipitation patterns over North America (Liu et al, 2017;Rohli et al, 2022). There are further indications of a possible link between the Pacific North American Pattern and North Atlantic Oscillation and Atlantic storm tracks trough baroclinic waves (Pinto et al, 2010).…”

A Place‐Based Approach to Drought Forecasting in South‐Central Oklahoma

“…Hence, the need for a better predictive tool was borne, so that water managers could plan for countermeasures in advance. Linkages of teleconnection patterns to the climate system have been established (e.g., Rohli et al, 2022) and, when their indices are in extreme states, their autocorrelation decay is on the order of years, permitting the signal to be leveraged for short-term prediction. However, based on the available observational and modeling evidence, the most plausible explanation for multidecadal peaks seen in the AMO and PDO is that they reflect the response to a combination of natural and anthropogenic forcings during the historical era (Mann et al, 2020).…”