Effect of ENSO Phase on Large-Scale Snow Water Equivalent Distribution in a GCM

Understanding links between the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and snow would be useful for seasonal forecasting, as well as for understanding natural variability and interpreting climate change predictions. Here, a 545-yr run of the third climate configuration of the Met Office Unified Model (HadCM3), with prescribed external forcings and fixed greenhouse gas concentrations, is used to explore the impact of ENSO on snow water equivalent (SWE) anomalies. In North America, positive ENSO events reduce the mean SWE and skew the distribution toward lower values, and vice versa during negative ENSO events. This is associated with a dipole SWE anomaly structure, with anomalies of opposite sign centered in western Canada and the central United States. In Eurasia, warm episodes lead to a more positively skewed distribution and the mean SWE is raised. Again, the opposite effect is seen during cold episodes. In Eurasia the largest anomalies are concentrated in the Himalayas. These correlations with February SWE distribution are seen to exist from the previous June–July–August (JJA) ENSO index onward, and are weakly detected in 50-yr subsections of the control run, but only a shifted North American response can be detected in the analysis of the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40). The ENSO signal in SWE from the long run could still contribute to regional predictions, although it would only be a weak indicator.