Nature Clim. Change 3, 52–58 (2013); published online 5 August 2012; corrected after print 22 January 2013.

In the version of this Letter originally published, in the sentence beginning “As SSTs have large influences on land precipitation...”, the latitude range of sc_PDSI_pm included in the maximum covariance analysis should have read 60° S–75° N. This error has now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions (note that the 'corrected after print' date in these online versions differs from that given in print).