Precipitation sensitivity to local variations in tropical sea surface temperature

AbstractThe driving of tropical precipitation by the variability of the underlying sea surface temperature (SST) plays a critical role in the atmospheric general circulation. To assess the precipitation sensitivity to SST variability, it is necessary to observe and understand the relationship between precipitation and SST. However, the precipitation–SST relationships from any coupled atmosphere–ocean system can be difficult to interpret given the challenge of disentangling the SST-forced atmospheric response and the atmospheric intrinsic variability. This study demonstrates that the two components can be isolated using uncoupled atmosphere-only simulations, which extract the former when driven by time-varying SSTs and the latter when driven by climatological SSTs. With a simple framework that linearly combines the two types of uncoupled simulations, the coupled precipitation–SST relationships are successfully reproduced. Such a framework can be a useful tool for quantitatively diagnosing tropical air–sea ...