The seasonal climate predictability of the Atlantic Warm Pool and its teleconnections

Our study reveals that there is promising seasonal predictability of the Atlantic Warm Pool (AWP; defined as the area enclosed by the 28.5 degrees C isotherm in tropical western Atlantic) and its associated teleconnections of late summer-early fall seasonal rainfall anomalies over the continental US displayed by a subset of the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME). We find that of the four NMME models at least two models (CFSv2 and GFDL) exhibit consistently useful deterministic and probabilistic skill in predicting the July-October (JASO) seasonal anomalies of the area of the AWP at lead times of up to four months. These two models shown are shown to beat the observed persistence skill by a significant margin at all lead times with the exception of lead time zero. The two NMME models also skillfully predict the teleconnections of the JASO AWP anomalies with the corresponding seasonal JASO rainfall anomalies in the eastern Mississippi valley. These prediction skills are significant improvement in warm season rainfall predictability over the continental US.