Historical and New Insights into Atmospheric Teleconnection

The “Teleconnection” term in climate studies was defined primarily for widely separated regions. This stems from the basic idea that a physical process, such as an advection or a particular synoptic system, cannot simply explain a relation or a correlation in large distances. Also, in modern times, models more often fail in predicting these remote patterns, particularly with regional models, such as in the hurricane example and its effect on Mediterranean precipitation, explored here. Several teleconnection relations are reviewed, with particular focus on Mediterranean rainfall. It is argued that even with a clear physical process of advection and for a short horizontal scale, ‘teleconnection’ is often not well understood, if the physical mechanism involved is complex, such as in the sub-synoptic scales of aerosol-rainfall interaction or megacities and their potential effects on precipitation. Thus, a broader look at the horizontal scale of teleconnection is proposed where the word TELE is still representing the word ‘far’, as in its Greek origin, but it also includes our limitation in understanding of complex atmospheric relations in various distances.

Furthermore, the hidden assumption that ancients were not able to observe teleconnections is contradicted by an example from ~1800 years ago. In this example, a claim was made in the Talmud that the Euphrates flow is strongly related to the rainfall over the greater Israel region, located at ~700-900 km westward. However, the understanding of this ancient teleconnection was only possible at the 2^nd half of the 19^th century when the role of synoptic systems in weather, has emerged. 

 

Keywords: Teleconnection, Rainfall, synoptic system, Euphrates discharge, Middle East, Levant, Talmud

 

REFERENCE:

P. Alpert and H. Saaroni, “Historical and New Insights into Atmospheric Teleconnection” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science (eds von Storch, H. et al.)  (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2021).(accepted Aug. 2021)