ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NORTHERN HEMISPHERIC WEATHER REGIMES IN WINTERTIME AND SPRING PRECIPITATION OVER CHINA

In this study, a possible relationship between global wintertime weather regimes in the northern hemisphere (NH) mid latitudes and the total precipitation over mainland China in the season following is investigated. Weather regimes are defined, as by Molteni et al. (1990), as clusters in the low-dimensional phase space of the leading rotated EOFs of 500 hPa geopotential height, while the total precipitation over continental China is cumulated over different periods in the following spring (representative of a pre-Mey-Yu rainfall). Some distinct NH winter weather regimes are found to be highly correlated with the subsequent spring rainfall and so constitute a good basis for a method of quantitative prediction based on simple linear regression techniques.