Tropical Atlantic rainfall drives bias in extratropical seasonal forecasts

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the impact of seasonal forecast biases in the Tropical Atlantic on the North Atlantic. The analysis uses a novel ensemble‐based method to estimate the impact of tropical rainfall bias on forecasts of the Extratropical North Atlantic. The inter‐ensemble spread of the forecast model is used to estimate the impact of the bias in Tropical Atlantic rainfall on the North Atlantic by selecting model members that happen to produce forecast anomalies that most closely resemble the tropical rainfall bias and using these as a proxy for the model error. The Tropical Atlantic rainfall bias impacts Rossby wave sources over the Subtropical Atlantic and there is a clear Rossby wave pattern originating from this area which is comparable to the mean bias in hindcasts. We argue that Tropical Atlantic rainfall errors explain a significant amount of the bias in seasonal forecasts over the Extratropical North Atlantic.

Keywords

• Boreal winter
• North Atlantic oscillation
• planetary waves
• predictability
• Rossby waves
• seasonal timescale