Consistent Coupled Patterns of Teleconnection Between Rainfall in the Ogooué River Basin and Sea Surface Temperature in Tropical Oceans

Abstract

This study investigates teleconnections between rainfall in the Ogooué River Basin (ORB) and sea surface temperature (SST) in the tropical ocean basins. The Maximum Covariance Analysis (MCA) is used to determine coupled patterns of SST in the tropical oceans and rainfall in the ORB, depicting regions and modes of SST dynamics that influence rainfall in the ORB. The application of MCA to rainfall and SST fields results in three coupled patterns with squared covariance fractions of 84.5%, 76.5%, and 77.5% for the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian tropical basins, respectively. Computation of the correlations of the Savitzky–Golay-filtered resulting expansion coefficients reached 0.65, 0.5 and 0.72, respectively. The SST variation modes identified in this study can be related to the Atlantic Meridional Mode for the tropical Atlantic and the El Niño Southern Oscillation for the tropical Pacific. Over the Indian Ocean, it is a homogeneous mode over the entire basin, instead of the popular dipole mode. Then, the time-dependent correlation method is used to remove any ambiguity on the relationships established from the MCA.