A hybrid approach for skillful multiseasonal prediction of winter North Pacific blocking

Abstract

Wintertime atmospheric blocking often brings adverse environmental and socioeconomic impacts through its accompanying temperature and precipitation extremes. However, due to the chaotic nature of the extratropical atmospheric circulation and the challenges in simulating blocking, the skillful seasonal prediction of blocking remains elusive. In this study, we leverage both observational data and seasonal hindcasts from a state-of-the-art seasonal prediction system to investigate the prediction skill of North Pacific wintertime blocking frequency and its linkage to downstream cold extremes. The observational results show that North Pacific blocking has a local maximum over the central North Pacific Ocean and that the occurrence of North Pacific blocking drives significant cold anomalies over northwestern North America within a week, which are both well reproduced by the model. The model skillfully predicts the western North Pacific blocking frequency near the subtropical jet exit region at the shortest forecast lead, but skill drops off rapidly with lead time partly due to model drift in the background flow. To overcome this rapid drop in skill, we develop a linear hybrid dynamical-statistical model that uses the forecasted Niño 3.4 index and upstream precipitation as predictors and that maintains significant forecast skill of high-latitude North Pacific blocking up to 7 lead months in advance. Our results indicate that an improvement in the seasonal prediction skill of winter North Pacific blocking frequency may be achieved by the enhanced representation of the links among sea surface temperature anomalies, tropical convection, and the ensuing tropical-extratropical interaction that initiates North Pacific blocking.