A Subseasonal Teleconnection Analysis: PNA Development and Its Relationship to the NAO

The Pacific-North American (PNA) teleconnection is a major mode of Northern Hemisphere wintertime climate variability, with well-known impacts on North American temperature and precipitation. To assess whether the PNA teleconnection has extended predictability, comprehensive data analysis is conducted to elucidate PNA evolution, with an emphasis on patterns of PNA development and decay. These patterns are identified using extended empirical orthogonal function (EEOF) and linear regression analyses on pentad-resolution atmospheric circulation data from the new Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR). Additionally, dynamical links between the PNA and another important mode of wintertime variability, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), are analyzed both in the presence and absence of notable tropical convections, for example, the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), which is known to be influential on both. The relationship is analyzed using EEOF and regression techniques. It is shown that the PNA structure is similar in both space and time when the MJO is linearly removed from the dataset. Furthermore, there is a small but significant lag between the NAO and PNA, with the NAO leading a PNA of opposite phase on time scales of one to three pentads. It is suggested from barotropic vorticity analysis that this relationship may result in part from excitation of Rossby waves by the NAO in the Asian waveguide.