Background
The main purpose of this paper was to evaluate the performance of the Flexible Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System model, Spectral Version 2 (FGOALS-s2) - a CGCM developed by the National Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences - with respect to its ability to simulate the relationship between ENSO and the East Asian-western North Pacific (EA-WNP) monsoon.

What was done
"After nearly five years of effort," in the words of the authors, the original model (Wu et al., 2009) "has been improved in various facets," and they state that it was therefore necessary "to carefully assess the ENSO-monsoon relationship in the current version of the model," which is what they did in this study.

What was learned
Finding #1: "The model fails to simulate the asymmetry of the wintertime circulation anomalies over the WNP between El Niņo and La Niņa."

Finding #2: "The simulated anomalous cyclone over the WNP (WNPAC) associated with La Niņa is generally symmetric about the WNPAC associated with El Niņo, rather than shifted westward as that in the observation."

Finding #3: "Simulated La Niņa events decay much faster than observed."

Finding #4: "Owing to biases in the mean state, the precipitation anomalies over East Asia, especially those of the Meiyu rain belt, are much weaker than that in the observation."

What it means
Although the model is improved over its earlier version, it still suffers from a number of bothersome inadequacies.

Reference
Wu, B., Zhou, T., Li, T. and Bao, Q. 2009. Inter-annual variability of the Asian-Australian monsoon and ENSO simulated by an ocean-atmosphere coupled model. Chinese Journal of Atmospheric Science 33: 285-299.