Key role of the Madden-Julian Oscillation on humid heatwaves

Abstract: Humid heat stress and heatwaves pose significant risks for living organisms, from humans and wildlife to insects, with wide-ranging health, ecological, and socio-economic impacts that are expected to worsen with climate change. How large-scale climate modes drive the week-to-month variability of humid heat remains poorly understood at the global scale, hindering accurate forecasts necessary for risk-management measures, notably in the heavily populated and ecologically fragile regions of the tropics and subtropics. With forecast lead times up to several weeks, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), a global-scale intraseasonal tropical atmospheric wave circumnavigating Earth in around 30-60 days, provides considerable predictability for weather conditions, and meteorological and oceanic extremes. Here we show that the MJO, and the associated boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation (BSISO), have a significant influence on humid heatwaves over much of the tropics and subtropics across all seasons, both over terrestrial and marine regions. Humid heatwave likelihood can double or halve, depending on the MJO phase, in large areas of the Earth. The MJO/BSISO's influence on wet-bulb temperature is primarily via specific humidity rather than dry-bulb temperature anomalies. We find that specific humidity anomalies are influenced by horizontal advection of moisture in the planetary boundary layer, particularly in the subtropics where advection of the climatological moisture gradient by MJO-related anomalous winds is the dominant term.