Combined impacts of ENSO and MJO on the 2015 growing season drought on the Canadian Prairies

Li, Zhenhua; Li, Yanping; Bonsal, Barrie; Manson, Alan H.; Scaff, Lucia

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-5057-2018

Articles | Volume 22, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-5057-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Understanding and predicting Earth system and hydrological...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-5057-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 10

Research article

|

01 Oct 2018

Research article |

| 01 Oct 2018

Combined impacts of ENSO and MJO on the 2015 growing season drought on the Canadian Prairies

Zhenhua Li, Yanping Li, Barrie Bonsal, Alan H. Manson, and Lucia Scaff

Data sets

MJO index Bureau of Meteorology of Australia http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/mjo/

ERA-interim Dataset ECMWF https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/archive-datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim

CMAP NOAA CPC http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/global_precip/html/wpage.cmap.html

MJO CPC index NOAA CPC http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/mjo.shtml

NCEP Reanalysis NOAA NCEP https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html

ERSST-V4 NOAA https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/marineocean-data/extended-reconstructed-sea-surface-temperature-ersst-v4

NINO4 index NOAA https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Nino4/

MEI NOAA https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/

Interpolated OLR NOAA https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.interp_OLR.html

Short summary

The research started by investigating the 2015 growing season drought over the Canadian Prairies and evolved into investigating the connection between growing season rain deficit in the Prairies and MJO (20–90 days tropical oscillation in convective storms). With warm central Pacific sea surface temperature, strong MJOs in the western Pacific cause Rossby wave trains that propagate downstream and favour upper-level ridges and rain deficits over the Canadian Prairies during the growing season.