Predictions of future states of the global climate rely on general circulation models (GCM's) (IPCC, 2007) but a major caveat in their use is that they can realistically simulate the current climate state. It has been found that many ‘atmosphere-only' GCMs with prescribed SST do capture observed climate variability in the northern hemisphere well, including ENSO teleconnections. In contrast, limited studies of the southern hemisphere extratropical circulation indicate GCMs are less realistic and appear not to properly capture ENSO teleconnections even though these are clearly identifiable in re-analyses.

This paper reports on ENSO teleconnections in the South Pacific extratropical atmospheric circulation in an ensemble of Hadley Centre ‘HADAM3' runs for the ‘Climate of the Twentieth Century' (C20C) project forced by observed monthly SST data. Contrary to some earlier work, the C20C simulation has strong, robust ENSO teleconnections in the South Pacific. But these only become apparent looking at the meridional wind field rather than MSLP data. There are, however, also some clear differences between the modelled and observed teleconnections. The initial results of the study will be presented and discussed.