North Pacific trade wind precursors to ENSO in the CMIP6 HighResMIP multimodel ensemble

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most prominent modes of coupled variability with sizable impacts on global climate and weather patterns, which makes the ability to predict the occurrence and development of ENSO events of fundamental importance. In order to achieve accurate and timely predictions, a well-established strategy is to understand and monitor known ENSO precursors. In this paper, we focus on North Pacific Oscillation (NPO)-related precursors, namely the trade wind charging and the Northern Pacific meridional mode (TWC/NPMM). In particular, we assess whether the TWC/NPMM mode and its relationship with ENSO is reconstructed across the CMIP6 protocol-driven ensemble High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project, which was developed to systematically test the impact of increased horizontal resolution. Here, we see that the TWC/NPMM is a consistent precursor of ENSO across the ensemble, notwithstanding some spatial variations in the reconstruction. Furthermore, previous analyses on observationally-based data show that the TWC/NPMM-ENSO relationship is robust, albeit not stationary, and its variations can influence the characteristic variability of ENSO itself. In particular, during those years when the TWC/NPMM-ENSO coupling is weak, ENSO oscillates regularly with constant periodicity; whereas, when the coupling is strong, ENSO shows a more stochastic behavior. A selected subset of better-performing HighResMIP models are able to reproduce the non-stationarity of the TWC/NPMM-ENSO coupling and to recreate how these variations are reflected in the characteristics of ENSO variability, similar to what was recorded in the observational analysis. In parallel with these analyses, we also assess their sensitivity to horizontal resolution and find that there is no consistent impact of resolution on the results described above.