Sur, Sharmila 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8102-2356 and Hendon, Harry H.
(2020)
Mechanisms of multiyear variations of Northern Australia wet-season rainfall.
Scientific Reports, 10 (1):5086.
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Sharmila_et_al-2020-Scientific_Reports.pdf Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (3MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Northern Australia wet season (November–April) rainfall exhibits strong variability on multiyear timescales. In order to reveal the underlying mechanisms of this variability, we investigate observational records for the period 1900–2017. At multiyear timescales, the rainfall varies coherently across north-western Australia (NW) and north-eastern Australia (NE), but the variability in these two regions is largely independent. The variability in the NE appears to be primarily controlled by the remote influence of low frequency variations of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In contrast, multiyear variations in the NW appear to be largely driven locally and stem from a combination of rainfall-wind-evaporation feedback, whereby enhanced land-based rainfall is associated with westerly wind anomalies to the west that enhance local evaporation over the ocean to feed the enhanced land based rainfall, and soil moisture-rainfall feedback. Soil-moisture and associated evapotranspiration over northern Australia appear to act as sources of memory for sustaining multiyear wet and dry conditions in the NW. Our results imply that predictability of multiyear rainfall variations over the NW may derive from the initial soil moisture state and its memory, while predictability in the NE will be limited by the predictability of the low frequency variations of ENSO.
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| Item Type: | Article (Commonwealth Reporting Category C) |
|---|---|
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Current - Institute for Life Sciences and the Environment - Centre for Applied Climate Sciences (1 Aug 2018 -) |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Current - Institute for Life Sciences and the Environment - Centre for Applied Climate Sciences (1 Aug 2018 -) |
| Date Deposited: | 06 May 2020 06:40 |
| Last Modified: | 07 Jan 2021 04:59 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | rainfall; climate; climate indices |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 04 Earth Sciences > 0401 Atmospheric Sciences > 040199 Atmospheric Sciences not elsewhere classified 04 Earth Sciences > 0401 Atmospheric Sciences > 040107 Meteorology |
| Identification Number or DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61482-5 |
| URI: | http://eprints.usq.edu.au/id/eprint/38632 |
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