ENSO teleconnections in the southern hemisphere: A climate network view

Using functional network analysis, we study the seasonality of atmospheric connectivity and its interannual variability depending on the different phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. We find a strong variability of the connectivity on seasonal and interannual time scales both in the tropical and extratropical regions. In particular, there are significant changes in the southern hemisphere extratropical atmospheric connectivity during austral spring within the different stages of ENSO: We find that the connectivity patterns due to stationary Rossby waves differ during El Niño and La Niña, showing a very clear wave train originating close to Australia in the former case, as opposed to La Niña that seems to generate a wave train from the central Pacific. An attempt to understand these differences in terms of changes in the frequency of intraseasonal weather regimes cannot fully explain the differences in connectivity, even though we found the prevalence of different intraseasonal regimes in each phase of ENSO. We conclude that the differential response to extreme phases of ENSO during austral springtime is related to the forcing of waves of different tropical origins.