Based on the close link with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean dipole, the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean should be regarded as a unit, named the Pacific–Indian Ocean associated mode (PIOAM), when studying and predicting climate variability in East Asia. Since the PIOAM is so important, the outputs of historical simulation from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) phase 5 were used to evaluate the reproducibility of PIOAM in current climate models.