Signature of the western boundary currents in local climate variability.

Abstract

The western boundary currents are characterized by narrow, intense ocean jets and are among the most energetic phenomena in the world ocean. The importance of the western boundary currents to the mean climate is well established: they transport vast quantities of heat from the subtropics to the midlatitudes¹, and they govern the structure of the climatological mean surface winds^2-6, precipitation^4-6 and extratropical storm tracks^7-13. Their importance to climate variability is much less clear, as the tropospheric response to extratropical sea surface temperature (SST) variability is generally modest relative to the internal variability in the midlatitude atmosphere^12-14. Here we exploit novel local analyses based on high-spatial-resolution data to demonstrate that SST variability in the western boundary currents has a more robust signature in climate variability than has been indicated in previous work. Our results indicate that warm SST anomalies in the major boundary currents of both hemispheres are associated with a distinct signature of locally enhanced precipitation and rising motion anomalies that extend throughout the depth of the troposphere. The tropospheric signature closely mirrors that of ocean dynamical processes in the boundary currents. Thus, the findings indicate a distinct and robust pathway through which extratropical ocean dynamical processes influence local climate variability. The observational relationships are also reproducible in Earth system model simulations but only when the simulations are run at high spatial resolution.