The link between North Atlantic tropical cyclones and ENSO in seasonal forecasts

TL;DR

This paper evaluates six European seasonal forecast models' ability to simulate the ENSO influence on North Atlantic tropical cyclones, highlighting strengths and limitations in their representation of observed teleconnections.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of model performance in simulating ENSO-TC teleconnections, identifying key issues affecting accuracy.

Findings

Models capture basin-wide ENSO-TC link but overestimate its strength.

Poor simulation of ENSO influence in the Caribbean region.

Wind shear forecasting errors partly explain teleconnection inaccuracies.

Abstract

This study assesses the ability of six European seasonal forecast models to simulate the observed teleconnection between ENSO and tropical cyclones (TCs) over the North Atlantic. While the models generally capture the basin-wide observed link, its magnitude is overestimated in all forecast models compared to reanalysis. Furthermore, the ENSO - TC relationship in the Caribbean is poorly simulated. It is shown that incorrect forecasting of wind shear appears to affect the representation of the teleconnection in some models, however it is not a completely sufficient explanation for the overestimation of the link.