Regionalization of climate teleconnections across Central Asian mountains improves the predictability of seasonal precipitation

Atabek Umirbekov, Mayra Daniela Peña-Guerrero and Daniel Müller

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2022, vol. 17, issue 5

Abstract: Mountains play a critical role in water cycles in semiarid regions by providing for the majority of the total runoff. However, hydroclimatic conditions in mountainous regions vary considerably in space and time, with high interannual fluctuations driven by large-scale climate oscillations. Here, we investigated teleconnections between global climate oscillations and the peak precipitation season from February to June in the Tian-Shan and Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. Using hierarchical climate regionalization, we identified seven subregions with distinct precipitation patterns, and assessed correlations with selected climate oscillations at different time lags. We then simulated the seasonal precipitation in each subregion from 1979 to 2020 using the most prevalent teleconnections as predictors with support vector regression (SVR). Our findings indicate that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the Eastern Atlantic/West Russia pattern are among the major determinants of the seasonal precipitation. The dominant lead-lag times of these oscillations make them reliable predictors ahead of the season. We detected notable teleconnections with the North Atlantic Oscillation and Scandinavian Pattern, with their strongest associations emerging after onset of the season. While the SVR-based models exhibit robust prediction skills, they tend to underestimate precipitation in extremely wet seasons. Overall, our study highlights the value of appropriate spatial and temporal aggregations for exploring the impacts of climate teleconnections on precipitation in complex terrains.

Keywords: climate teleconnections; Central Asia; machine learning; mountains; seasonal forecasting; precipitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/251962/1/U ... _teleconnections.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:251962

DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac6229

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().