The influence of the Southern Oscillation and volcanic eruptions on temperature in the tropical troposphere

1985 ◽  
Vol 32 (12) ◽  
pp. 1005
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shraddha Gupta ◽  
Niklas Boers ◽  
Florian Pappenberger ◽  
Jürgen Kurths

AbstractTropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the most destructive natural hazards that pose a serious threat to society, particularly to those in the coastal regions. In this work, we study the temporal evolution of the regional weather conditions in relation to the occurrence of TCs using climate networks. Climate networks encode the interactions among climate variables at different locations on the Earth’s surface, and in particular, time-evolving climate networks have been successfully applied to study different climate phenomena at comparably long time scales, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, different monsoon systems, or the climatic impacts of volcanic eruptions. Here, we develop and apply a complex network approach suitable for the investigation of the relatively short-lived TCs. We show that our proposed methodology has the potential to identify TCs and their tracks from mean sea level pressure (MSLP) data. We use the ERA5 reanalysis MSLP data to construct successive networks of overlapping, short-length time windows for the regions under consideration, where we focus on the north Indian Ocean and the tropical north Atlantic Ocean. We compare the spatial features of various topological properties of the network, and the spatial scales involved, in the absence and presence of a cyclone. We find that network measures such as degree and clustering exhibit significant signatures of TCs and have striking similarities with their tracks. The study of the network topology over time scales relevant to TCs allows us to obtain crucial insights into the effects of TCs on the spatial connectivity structure of sea-level pressure fields.


Climate ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristoffer Rypdal

The main features of the instrumental global mean surface temperature (GMST) are reasonably well described by a simple linear response model driven by anthropogenic, volcanic and solar forcing. This model acts as a linear long-memory filter of the forcing signal. The physical interpretation of this filtering is the delayed response due to the thermal inertia of the ocean. This description is considerably more accurate if El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) are regarded as additional forcings of the global temperature and hence subject to the same filtering as the other forcing components. By considering these as predictors in a linear regression scheme, more than 92% of the variance in the instrumental GMST over the period 1870–2017 is explained by this model, in particular, all features of the 1998–2015 hiatus, including its death. While the more prominent pauses during 1870–1915 and 1940–1970 can be attributed to clustering in time of strong volcanic eruptions, the recent hiatus is an unremarkable phenomenon that is attributed to ENSO with a small contribution from solar activity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meng Zuo ◽  
Tianjun Zhou ◽  
Wenmin Man

<p>Both proxy data and climate modeling show divergent responses of global monsoon precipitation to volcanic eruptions. The reason is however unknown. Here, based on analysis of the CESM Last Millennium Ensemble simulation, we show evidences that the divergent responses are dominated by the pre-eruption background oceanic states. We found that under El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) neutral and warm phases initial conditions, the Pacific favors an El Niño-like anomaly after volcanic eruptions, while La Niña-like SST anomalies tend to occur following eruptions under ENSO cold phase initial condition, especially after southern eruptions. The cold initial condition is associated with stronger upper ocean temperature stratification and shallower thermocline over the eastern Pacific than normal. The easterly anomalies triggered by surface cooling over the tropical South America continent can generate changes in SST through anomalous advection and the ocean subsurface upwelling more efficiently, causing La Niña-like SST anomalies. Whereas under warm initial condition, the easterly anomalies fail to develop and the westerly anomalies still play a dominant role, thus forms an El Niño-like SST anomaly. Such SST response further regulates the monsoon precipitation changes through atmospheric teleconnection. The contribution of direct radiative forcing and indirect SST response to precipitation changes show regional differences, which will further affect the intensity and sign of precipitation response in submonsoon regions. Our results imply that attention should be paid to the background oceanic state when predicting the global monsoon precipitation responses to volcanic eruptions.</p>


Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 367 (6485) ◽  
pp. 1477-1481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia G. Dee ◽  
Kim M. Cobb ◽  
Julien Emile-Geay ◽  
Toby R. Ault ◽  
R. Lawrence Edwards ◽  
...  

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) shapes global climate patterns yet its sensitivity to external climate forcing remains uncertain. Modeling studies suggest that ENSO is sensitive to sulfate aerosol forcing associated with explosive volcanism but observational support for this effect remains ambiguous. Here, we used absolutely dated fossil corals from the central tropical Pacific to gauge ENSO’s response to large volcanic eruptions of the last millennium. Superposed epoch analysis reveals a weak tendency for an El Niño–like response in the year after an eruption, but this response is not statistically significant, nor does it appear after the outsized 1257 Samalas eruption. Our results suggest that those models showing a strong ENSO response to volcanic forcing may overestimate the size of the forced response relative to natural ENSO variability.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (8) ◽  
pp. 1822-1826 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Stevenson ◽  
John T. Fasullo ◽  
Bette L. Otto-Bliesner ◽  
Robert A. Tomas ◽  
Chaochao Gao

The response of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to tropical volcanic eruptions has important worldwide implications, but remains poorly constrained. Paleoclimate records suggest an “El Niño-like” warming 1 year following major eruptions [Adams JB, Mann ME, Ammann CM (2003)Nature426:274–278] and “La Niña-like” cooling within the eruption year [Li J, et al. (2013)Nat Clim Chang3:822–826]. However, climate models currently cannot capture all these responses. Many eruption characteristics are poorly constrained, which may contribute to uncertainties in model solutions—for example, the season of eruption occurrence is often unknown and assigned arbitrarily. Here we isolate the effect of eruption season using experiments with the Community Earth System Model (CESM), varying the starting month of two large tropical eruptions. The eruption-year atmospheric circulation response is strongly seasonally dependent, with effects on European winter warming, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, and the southeast Asian monsoon. This creates substantial variations in eruption-year hydroclimate patterns, which do sometimes exhibit La Niña-like features as in the proxy record. However, eruption-year equatorial Pacific cooling is not driven by La Niña dynamics, but strictly by transient radiative cooling. In contrast, equatorial warming the following year occurs for all starting months and operates dynamically like El Niño. Proxy reconstructions confirm these results: eruption-year cooling is insignificant, whereas warming in the following year is more robust. This implies that accounting for the event season may be necessary to describe the initial response to volcanic eruptions and that climate models may be more accurately simulating volcanic influences than previously thought.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natália Silva ◽  
Ilana Wainer ◽  
Myriam Khodri

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Large tropical volcanic eruptions are well known to change the global climate and maybe even interfere with some natural modes of variability such as El Niño Southern Oscillation. As they inject a high amount of sulfur gas into the stratosphere, sulfate aerosol loading increases a few months after the eruption, which is then transported globally. Large tropical events may, therefore, affect extratropical climate variability. For example, temperature changes have been identified in Antarctica after the Pinatubo eruption in 1991, as warming in the peninsula. However, a causal link with the eruption and, more generally, a possible influence of large tropical volcanic eruptions on the Southern Hemisphere climate are still open questions. In this study we aim to focus on the five biggest eruptions of the historical period (Krakatau — Aug/1883, Santa María — Oct/1902, Mt Agung — Mar/1963, El Chichón — Apr/1982 and Pinatubo — Jun/1991) by assessing two CMIP6 class models (IPSL-CM6A-LR Large Ensemble and BESM) and two Reanalyses (NOAA 20th Century Reanalysis and ECMWF's ERA 20th Century). </span></p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1325-1338 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Meyer ◽  
D. Folini ◽  
U. Lohmann ◽  
T. Peter

Abstract Tropical land mean surface air temperature and precipitation responses to the eruptions of El Chichón in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991, as simulated by the atmosphere-only GCMs (AMIP) in phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), are examined and compared to three observational datasets. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal was statistically separated from the volcanic signal in all time series. Focusing on the ENSO signal, it was found that the 17 investigated AMIP models successfully simulate the observed 4-month delay in the temperature responses to the ENSO phase but simulate somewhat too-fast precipitation responses during the El Niño onset stage. The observed correlation between temperature and ENSO phase (correlation coefficient of 0.75) is generally captured well by the models (simulated correlation of 0.71 and ensemble means of 0.61–0.83). For precipitation, mean correlations with the ENSO phase are −0.59 for observations and −0.53 for the models, with individual ensemble members having correlations as low as −0.26. Observed, ENSO-removed tropical land temperature and precipitation decrease by about 0.35 K and 0.25 mm day−1 after the Pinatubo eruption, while no significant decrease in either variable was observed after El Chichón. The AMIP models generally capture this behavior despite a tendency to overestimate the precipitation response to El Chichón. Scatter is substantial, both across models and across ensemble members of individual models. Natural variability thus may still play a prominent role despite the strong volcanic forcing.


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