The Northwest Pacific Summer Monsoon (NWPSM) is one of the important subcomponents of the global monsoon, and it has considerable impacts on the livelihood of more than one billion people in East Asia. The interannual variability of NWPSM is intrinsically strongly affected by El Ni？o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The outputs from the Coupled Models Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) (Taylor et al. 2012) provide a good opportunity to explore the relationship between ENSO and East Asia summer climate using state-of-the-art coupled general circulation models. The performances of models in simulating the relationship between ENSO and the Northwest Pacific summer climate are deserved to explore. 

Professor HUANG Gang and his doctoral student JIANG Wenping and their collaborators, from Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have investigated the biases of the relationship among 37 CMIP5 models. They pointed out that large inter-model spread exists in the 37 state-of-the-art CMIP5 models in simulating the ENSO-Northwest Pacific summer climate relationship. The simulation skill of ENSO-NWP relationship largely depends on whether the model can reasonably reproduce the ENSO decay pace. Warm SST anomaly bias in the equatorial western Pacific (EWP) is found to persist into the ENSO decay summer in the low-skill models, obstructing the formation of an anomalous anticyclone in the NWP. Further analysis shows that the warm EWP SST anomaly bias is possibly related to the excessive westward extension of cold tongue in these models.