Impacts of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) on Australian rainfall are diagnosed from the perspective of tropical and extratropical teleconnections triggered by tropical sea surface temperature (SST) variations. The tropical teleconnection is understood as the equatorially trapped, deep baroclinic response to the diabatic (convective) heating anomalies induced by the tropical SST anomalies. These diabatic heating anomalies also excite equivalent barotropic Rossby wave trains that propagate into the extratropics. The main direct tropical teleconnection during ENSO is the Southern Oscillation (SO), whose impact on Australian rainfall is argued to be mainly confined to near-tropical portions of eastern Australia. Rainfall is suppressed during El Niño because near-tropical eastern Australia directly experiences subsidence and higher surface pressure associated with the western pole of the SO. Impacts on extratropical Australian rainfall during El Niño are argued to stem primarily from the Rossby wave trains forced by convective variations in the Indian Ocean, for which the IOD is a primary source of variability. These equivalent-barotropic Rossby wave trains emanating from the Indian Ocean induce changes to the midlatitude westerlies across southern Australia, thereby affecting rainfall through changes in mean-state baroclinicity, west–east steering, and possibly orographic effects. Although the IOD does not mature until austral spring, its impact on Australian rainfall during winter is also ascribed to this mechanism. Because ENSO is largely unrelated to the IOD during austral winter, there is limited impact of ENSO on rainfall across southern latitudes of Australia in winter. A strong impact of ENSO on southern Australia rainfall in spring is ascribed to the strong covariation of ENSO and the IOD in this season. Implications of this pathway from the tropical Indian Ocean for impacts of both the IOD and ENSO on southern Australian climate are discussed with regard to the ability to make seasonal climate predictions and with regard to the role of trends in tropical SST for driving trends in Australian climate.

After exhibiting an upward trend since 1979, Antarctic sea ice extent (SIE) declined dramatically during austral spring 2016, reaching a record low by December 2016. Here we show that a combination of atmospheric and oceanic phenomena played primary roles for this decline. The anomalous atmospheric circulation was initially driven by record strength tropical convection over the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, which resulted in a wave-3 circulation pattern around Antarctica that acted to reduce SIE in the Indian Ocean, Ross and Bellingshausen Sea sectors. Subsequently, the polar stratospheric vortex weakened significantly, resulting in record weakening of the circumpolar surface westerlies that acted to decrease SIE in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean sectors. These processes appear to reflect unusual internal atmosphere-ocean variability. However, the warming trend of the tropical Indian Ocean, which may partly stem from anthropogenic forcing, may have contributed to the severity of the 2016 SIE decline.

Recent research has shown that the climatic impact from El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on middle latitudes west of the western Pacific (e.g., southeast Australia) during austral spring (September–November) is conducted via the tropical Indian Ocean (TIO). However, it is not clear whether this impact pathway is symmetric about the positive and negative phases of ENSO and the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD). It is shown that a strong asymmetry does exist. For ENSO, only the impact from El Niño is conducted through the TIO pathway; the impact from La Niña is delivered through the Pacific–South America pattern. For the IOD, a greater convection anomaly and wave train response occurs during positive IOD (pIOD) events than during negative IOD (nIOD) events. This “impact asymmetry” is consistent with the positive skewness of the IOD, principally due to a negative skewness of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the east IOD (IODE) pole. In the IODE region, convection anomalies are more sensitive to a per unit change of cold SST anomalies than to the same unit change of warm SST anomalies. This study shows that the IOD skewness occurs despite the greater damping, rather than due to a breakdown of this damping as suggested by previous studies. This IOD impact asymmetry provides an explanation for much of the reduction in spring rainfall over southeast Australia during the 2000s. Key to this rainfall reduction is the increased occurrences of pIOD events, more so than the lack of nIOD events.

An asymmetry, and its multidecadal variability, in a rainfall teleconnection with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) are described. Further, the breakdown of this relationship since 1980 is offered as a cause for a rainfall reduction in an ENSO-affected region, southeast Queensland (SEQ). There, austral summer rainfall has been declining since around the 1980s, but the associated process is not understood. It is demonstrated that the rainfall reduction is not simulated by the majority of current climate models forced with anthropogenic forcing factors. Examination shows that ENSO is a rainfall-generating mechanism for the region because of an asymmetry in its impact: the La Niña–rainfall relationship is statistically significant, as SEQ summer rainfall increases with La Niña amplitude; by contrast, the El Niño–induced rainfall reductions do not have a statistically significant relationship with El Niño amplitude. Since 1980, this asymmetry no longer operates, and La Niña events no longer induce a rainfall increase, leading to the observed SEQ rainfall reduction. A similar asymmetric rainfall teleconnection with ENSO Modoki exists and shares the same temporal evolutions. This breakdown is caused by an eastward shift in the Walker circulation and the convection center near Australia’s east coast, in association with a post-1980 positive phase of the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO). Such a breakdown occurred before 1950, indicating that multidecadal variability alone could potentially be responsible for the recent SEQ rainfall decline. An aggregation of outputs from climate models to distill the impact of climate change suggests that the asymmetry and the breakdown may not be generated by climate change, although most models do not perform well in simulating the ENSO–rainfall teleconnection over the SEQ region.