Large-scale modes of climate variability (or teleconnection patterns), such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation, affect local weather worldwide. However, the response of terrestrial water and energy fluxes to these modes of variability is still poorly understood. Here, we analyse the response of evaporation to 16 teleconnection patterns, using a simple supervised learning framework and global observation-based datasets of evaporation and its key climatic drivers. Our results show that the month-to-month variability in terrestrial evaporation is strongly affected by (coupled) oscillations in sea-surface temperature and air pressure: in specific hotspot regions, up to 40% of the evaporation dynamics can be explained by climate indices describing the fundamental modes of climate variability. While the El Niño Southern Oscillation affects the dynamics in land evaporation worldwide, other phenomena such as the East Pacific–North Pacific teleconnection pattern are more dominant at regional scales. Most modes of climate variability affect terrestrial evaporation by inducing changes in the atmospheric demand for water. However, anomalies in precipitation associated to particular teleconnections are crucial for the evaporation in water-limited regimes, as well as in forested regions where interception loss forms a substantial fraction of total evaporation. Our results highlight the need to consider the concurrent impact of these teleconnections to accurately predict the fate of the terrestrial branch of the hydrological cycle, and provide observational evidence to help improve the representation of surface fluxes in Earth system models.

诸如厄尔尼诺南部涛动和北大西洋涛动等大规模的气候变化模式（或遥相关型）影响着世界各地的天气。但是，人们对陆地水和能量通量对这些变率模式的响应仍然知之甚少。在这里，我们使用一个简单的监督学习框架和基于全球观测的蒸发数据集及其关键气候驱动因素，分析了蒸发对16种遥距连接模式的响应。我们的结果表明，海面温度和气压的（耦合）振荡强烈影响着陆地蒸发的逐月变化：在特定的热点地区，高达40％的蒸发动态可以由气候指数解释描述气候变化的基本模式。厄尔尼诺南方涛动影响着世界范围内土地蒸发的动力，而其他现象，例如东太平洋-北太平洋遥相关型，在区域范围内更为占主导地位。大多数气候变率模式都会通过引起大气对水的需求变化来影响陆地蒸发。然而，与特定遥相关的降水异常对于在水有限的地区以及在森林区域中的蒸发至关重要，在森林区域中，拦截损失占总蒸发量的很大一部分。我们的结果强调需要考虑这些遥相关的并发影响，以准确预测水文循环的陆地分支的命运，并提供观测证据，以帮助改善地球系统模型中表面通量的表示。