Key role of the Madden-Julian Oscillation on tropical and subtropical humid heat and heatwaves

Abstract

Humid heat stress and heatwaves pose significant risks for living organisms, from humans and wildlife to insects. These threats have wide-ranging health, ecological, and socio-economic impacts that are expected to worsen with climate change. How large-scale climate modes drive the week-to-month variability of humid heat remains poorly understood at the global scale. This limitation hinders the development of accurate forecasts necessary for risk-management measures, notably in the heavily populated and ecologically fragile regions of the tropics and subtropics. With forecast lead times up to several weeks, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), a global-scale intraseasonal tropical atmospheric disturbance circumnavigating earth in around 30-60 days, provides considerable predictability for weather conditions, and meteorological and oceanic extremes. Here we show that the MJO, and the associated boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation (BSISO), have a significant influence on humid heat and heatwaves over much of the tropics and subtropics across all seasons, both over terrestrial and marine regions. Humid heatwave likelihood can double or halve, depending on the MJO phase, in large areas of the Earth. The MJO/BSISO's influence on wet-bulb temperature is primarily via specific humidity rather than dry-bulb temperature anomalies. In the subtropics and other regions where we typically do not find a strong signal of the convection, we find that intraseasonal anomalies of specific humidity and dry-bulb temperature are influenced by horizontal advection in the planetary boundary layer. Particularly in the subtropics where advection of the climatological moisture and temperature gradient by MJO-related anomalous winds is an important term.