Snow-(N)AO relationship revisited over the whole twentieth century
Douville, Hervé ; Peings, Yannick ; Saint-Martin, David
Several studies suggest that the Siberian snow cover in fall is a source of predictability of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) in winter. Although a plausible dynamical mechanism was proposed, the robustness of this relationship was recently challenged. Here we use two atmospheric reanalyses to revisit the snow-AO relationship and its modulation across the whole twentieth century. While our results support a stratospheric pathway mechanism, they show that the snow-AO relationship has only emerged in the 1970s and should be rather analyzed as a contrasted multidecadal behavior of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Pacific North America pattern. They confirm that the quasi-biennial oscillation is a plausible candidate for the modulation of the snow-(N)AO relationship across the twentieth century, but they further show that this modulation might be a purely stochastic effect. Therefore, they emphasize the limitations of any empirical prediction of the (N)AO only based on snow and/or sea ice predictors.
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