A Regime Shift in the Interhemispheric Teleconnection between the Yellow and East China Seas and The Southeastern Tropical Pacific in The Southern Hemisphere during The Boreal Summer

Abstract

Through statistical estimations on reconstructed datasets for the period 1982−2020 after removing a long-term trend, we observed that there was a drastic regime shift in the early summer’s connection between the YECS and the tropical Pacific in the early 2000s. The summer YECS SSTs had seemed to be modulated by local oceanic and atmospheric processes along with their marginal coupling to the tropical Pacific during the pre-2003 period before the regime shift. In contrast, an interhemispheric YECS−tropical southeastern Pacific (SEP) coupling appeared after the regime shift. This teleconnection was at least partially attributed to a reduced El Niño signature in the tropical Pacific, which favors the emergence of the South Pacific meridional mode (SPMM) independently from ENSO signals. Precipitation anomalies in the western tropical Pacific act as an atmospheric bridge to mediate the air-sea interacted variability associated with the SPMM into the North Pacific. The susceptibility of the YECS to atmospheric forcing may highlight the role of SST over the YECS as a potential indicator of basin-scale climate changes.