scholarly journals Remote impacts of 2009 and 2015 El Niño on oceanic and biological processes in a marginal sea of the Northwestern Pacific

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoonho Jung ◽  
Jae-Hun Park ◽  
Naoki Hirose ◽  
Sang-Wook Yeh ◽  
Kuk Jin Kim ◽  
...  

AbstractThe significance of long-term teleconnections derived from the anomalous climatic conditions of El Niño has been a highly debated topic, where the remote response of coastal hydrodynamics and marine ecosystems to El Niño conditions is not completely understood. The 14-year long data from a ship-borne acoustic Doppler current profiler was used to examine the El Niño’s impact, in particular, 2009 and 2015 El Niño events, on oceanic and biological processes in coastal regions across the Korea/Tsushima Strait. Here, it was revealed that the summer volume transport could be decreased by 8.7% (from 2.46 ± 0.39 to 2.24 ± 0.26 Sv) due to the anomalous northerly winds in the developing year of El Niño. Furthermore, the fall mean volume backscattering strength could be decreased by 1.8% (from − 97.09 ± 2.14 to − 98.84 ± 2.10 dB) due to the decreased surface solar radiation after the El Niño events. Overall, 2009 and 2015 El Niño events remotely affected volume transport and zooplankton abundance across the Korea/Tsushima Strait through climatic teleconnections.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Xu ◽  
Lei Chen ◽  
Wansuo Duan

AbstractThe optimally growing initial errors (OGEs) of El Niño events are found in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) by the conditional nonlinear optimal perturbation (CNOP) method. Based on the characteristics of low-dimensional attractors for ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) systems, we apply singular vector decomposition (SVD) to reduce the dimensions of optimization problems and calculate the CNOP in a truncated phase space by the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. In the CESM, we obtain three types of OGEs of El Niño events with different intensities and diversities and call them type-1, type-2 and type-3 initial errors. Among them, the type-1 initial error is characterized by negative SSTA errors in the equatorial Pacific accompanied by a negative west–east slope of subsurface temperature from the subsurface to the surface in the equatorial central-eastern Pacific. The type-2 initial error is similar to the type-1 initial error but with the opposite sign. The type-3 initial error behaves as a basin-wide dipolar pattern of tropical sea temperature errors from the sea surface to the subsurface, with positive errors in the upper layers of the equatorial eastern Pacific and negative errors in the lower layers of the equatorial western Pacific. For the type-1 (type-2) initial error, the negative (positive) temperature errors in the eastern equatorial Pacific develop locally into a mature La Niña (El Niño)-like mode. For the type-3 initial error, the negative errors in the lower layers of the western equatorial Pacific propagate eastward with Kelvin waves and are intensified in the eastern equatorial Pacific. Although the type-1 and type-3 initial errors have different spatial patterns and dynamic growing mechanisms, both cause El Niño events to be underpredicted as neutral states or La Niña events. However, the type-2 initial error makes a moderate El Niño event to be predicted as an extremely strong event.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shouwen Zhang ◽  
Hui Wang ◽  
Hua Jiang ◽  
Wentao Ma

AbstractThe late spring rainfall may account for 15% of the annual total rainfall, which is crucial to early planting in southeastern China. A better understanding of the precipitation variations in the late spring and its predictability not only greatly increase our knowledge of related mechanisms, but it also benefits society and the economy. Four models participating in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) were selected to study their abilities to forecast the late spring rainfall over southeastern China and the major sources of heavy rainfall from the perspective of the sea surface temperature (SST) field. We found that the models have better abilities to forecast the heavy rainfall over the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River region (MLYZR) with only a 1-month lead time, but they failed for a 3-month lead time since the occurrence of the heavy rainfall was inconsistent with the observations. The observations indicate that the warm SST anomalies in the tropical eastern Indian Ocean are vital to the simultaneously heavy rainfall in the MLYZR in May, but an El Niño event is not a necessary condition for determining the heavy rainfall over the MLYZR. The heavy rainfall over the MLYZR in May is always accompanied by warming of the northeastern Indian Ocean and of the northeastern South China Sea (NSCS) from April to May in the models and observations, respectively. In the models, El Niño events may promote the warming processes over the northeastern Indian Ocean, which leads to heavy rainfall in the MLYZR. However, in the real world, El Niño events are not the main reason for the warming of the NSCS, and further research on the causes of this warming is still needed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (19) ◽  
pp. 7561-7575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoo-Geun Ham ◽  
Yerim Jeong ◽  
Jong-Seong Kug

Abstract This study uses archives from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) to investigate changes in independency between two types of El Niño events caused by greenhouse warming. In the observations, the independency between cold tongue (CT) and warm pool (WP) El Niño events is distinctively increased in recent decades. The simulated changes in independency between the two types of El Niño events according to the CMIP5 models are quite diverse, although the observed features are simulated to some extent in several climate models. It is found that the climatological change after global warming is an essential factor in determining the changes in independency between the two types of El Niño events. For example, the independency between these events is increased after global warming when the climatological precipitation is increased mainly over the equatorial central Pacific. This climatological precipitation increase extends convective response to the east, particularly for CT El Niño events, which leads to greater differences in the spatial pattern between the two types of El Niño events to increase the El Niño independency. On the contrary, in models with decreased independency between the two types of El Niño events after global warming, climatological precipitation is increased mostly over the western Pacific. This confines the atmospheric response to the western Pacific in both El Niño events; therefore, the similarity between them is increased after global warming. In addition to the changes in the climatological state after global warming, a possible connection of the changes in the El Niño independency with the historical mean state is discussed in this paper.


Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 851
Author(s):  
Gen Li ◽  
Zhiyuan Zhang ◽  
Bo Lu

Under increased greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing, climate models tend to project a warmer sea surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific than in the western equatorial Pacific. This El Niño-like warming pattern may induce an increase in the projected occurrence frequency of extreme El Niño events. The current models, however, commonly suffer from an excessive westward extension of the equatorial Pacific cold tongue accompanied by insufficient equatorial western Pacific precipitation. By comparing the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 experiments with the historical simulations based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5), a “present–future” relationship among climate models was identified: models with insufficient equatorial western Pacific precipitation error would have a weaker mean El Niño-like warming pattern as well as a lower increase in the frequency of extreme El Niño events under increased GHG forcing. Using this “present–future” relationship and the observed precipitation in the equatorial western Pacific, this study calibrated the climate projections in the tropical Pacific. The corrected projections showed a stronger El Niño-like pattern of mean changes in the future, consistent with our previous study. In particular, the projected increased occurrence of extreme El Niño events under RCP 8.5 forcing are underestimated by 30–35% in the CMIP5 multi-model ensemble before the corrections. This implies an increased risk of the El Niño-related weather and climate disasters in the future.


2018 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. S91-S96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Funk ◽  
Frank Davenport ◽  
Laura Harrison ◽  
Tamuka Magadzire ◽  
Gideon Galu ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (24) ◽  
pp. 9869-9879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianping Duan ◽  
Lun Li ◽  
Zhuguo Ma ◽  
Jan Esper ◽  
Ulf Büntgen ◽  
...  

Large volcanic eruptions may cause abrupt summer cooling over large parts of the globe. However, no comparable imprint has been found on the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Here, we introduce a 400-yr-long temperature-sensitive network of 17 tree-ring maximum latewood density sites from the TP that demonstrates that the effects of tropical eruptions on the TP are generally greater than those of extratropical eruptions. Moreover, we found that large tropical eruptions accompanied by subsequent El Niño events caused less summer cooling than those that occurred without El Niño association. Superposed epoch analysis (SEA) based on 27 events, including 14 tropical eruptions and 13 extratropical eruptions, shows that the summer cooling driven by extratropical eruptions is insignificant on the TP, while significant summer temperature decreases occur subsequent to tropical eruptions. Further analysis of the TP August–September temperature responses reveals a significant postvolcanic cooling only when no El Niño event occurred. However, there is no such cooling for all other situations, that is, tropical eruptions together with a subsequent El Niño event, as well as extratropical eruptions regardless of the occurrence of an El Niño event. The averaged August–September temperature deviation ( Tdev) following 10 large tropical eruptions without a subsequent El Niño event is up to −0.48° ± 0.19°C (with respect to the preceding 5-yr mean), whereas the temperature deviation following 4 large tropical eruptions with an El Niño association is approximately 0.23° ± 0.16°C. These results indicate a mitigation effect of El Niño events on the TP temperature response to large tropical eruptions. The possible mechanism is that El Niño events can weaken the Indian summer monsoon with a subsequent decrease in rainfall and cooling effect, which may lead to a relatively high temperature on the TP, one of the regions affected by the Indian summer monsoon.


Author(s):  
César Flores-Coto ◽  
Faustino Zavala-García ◽  
Rene Funes-Rodríguez ◽  
María de la Luz Espinosa-Fuentes ◽  
Jorge Zavala-Hidalgo

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