Synchronized spatial shifts of Hadley and Walker circulations

Yun, Kyung-Sook; Timmermann, Axel; Stuecker, Malte F.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-121-2021

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-121-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-121-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

02 Feb 2021

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 02 Feb 2021

Synchronized spatial shifts of Hadley and Walker circulations

Kyung-Sook Yun, Axel Timmermann, and Malte F. Stuecker

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-121-2021-supplement

Data sets

ECMWF reanalysis - Interim data ERA-CLIM https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-interim

GPCP version 2.3 Combined Precipitation Data Set Physical Sciences Laboratory https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcp.html

CRU Time-Series (TS) version 4.03 of high-resolution gridded data of month-by-month variation in climate (Jan. 1901--Dec. 2018) University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit https://doi.org/10.5285/10d3e3640f004c578403419aac167d82

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Short summary

Changes in the Hadley and Walker cells cause major climate disruptions across our planet. What has been overlooked so far is the question of whether these two circulations can shift their positions in a synchronized manner. We here show the synchronized spatial shifts between Walker and Hadley cells and further highlight a novel aspect of how tropical sea surface temperature anomalies can couple these two circulations. The re-positioning has important implications for extratropical rainfall.