Weather and climate extremes often lead to dramatic losses in our society and warrant improvement of their understanding. In this study, the decadal variations in the first two dominant empirical orthogonal function (EOF) modes of winter extreme cold days (WECDs) in northern China (NC) have been investigated. Results show that both EOF modes show distinct decadal variations that together explain around 24% of total variances. At the decadal time scale, the EOF1 is closely related to the decadal Arctic Oscillation (AO); the negative AO can lead to spatially consistent increase of WECDs in NC. On the other hand, the decadal EOF2 can be influenced by the decadal El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The decadal El Niño can result in the large-scale negative sea level pressure (SLP) anomalies in the Eurasian continent west of the western NC and the positive ones over western China. The anomalous southwesterlies between the contrasted SLP anomalies can advect the warmer air from the lower latitudes to the western NC, decrease the WECDs there, and contribute to the east-west asymmetric WECD anomalies in NC. The impacts of El Niño are confirmed by the numerical simulations in the Atmospheric Model 2.1 (AM2.1) when forced by the El Niño-related sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the tropical Pacific.
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