Kina - TeleConnect - Analyses of climate teleconnections in two coupled atmosphere-sea ice-ocean models

Deeper understanding of the intrinsic variability and stability properties of the main variability modes of the climate system is needed to assess confidence in the detection, attribution and prediction of global and regional climate variability and clima te change, to improve seasonal predictions, to understand the shortcomings of current prediction systems and current climate models, and to properly address the feasibility of long-term (for instance decadal scale) climate predictions. It is well docume nted that the past and the present climate system exhibit variability modes on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Some of the most prominent of the climate variability modes are known as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with centre of action in the Equatorial Pacific, the North-Atlantic Oscillation/Arctic Oscillation (NAO/AO) with centre of action at high northern latitudes, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) with centre of action over the North Pacific Ocean. It is proposed to init iate tailored studies of the coupled climate modes involving low- and high latitudes. The research will be conducted at Peking University (Beijing), the Institute of Atmospheric Physics/Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing), and the Nansen Center (Bergen) and the Nansen-Zhu Centre (Beijing). The research will be directly linked to the European Commission supported FP6-project DYNAMITE (Understanding the Dynamics of the Coupled Climate System). The project initialization project therefore aims to bridge some of the best and most central climate modeling groups in China, at Peking University and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics/Chinese Academy of Sciences, with climate modelling groups in Europe in general and in Norway in particular.