scholarly journals Mixed-Mode Oscillations of El Niño–Southern Oscillation

2016 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 1755-1766 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Roberts ◽  
John Guckenheimer ◽  
Esther Widiasih ◽  
Axel Timmermann ◽  
Christopher K. R. T. Jones

Abstract Very strong El Niño events occur sporadically every 10–20 yr. The origin of this bursting behavior still remains elusive. Using a simplified three-dimensional dynamical model of the tropical Pacific climate system, which captures El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) combined with recently developed mathematical tools for fast–slow systems, the authors show that decadal ENSO bursting behavior can be explained as a mixed-mode oscillation (MMO), which also predicts a critical threshold for rapid amplitude growth. It is hypothesized that the MMO dynamics of the low-dimensional climate model can be linked to a saddle-focus equilibrium point, which mimics a tropical Pacific Ocean state without ocean circulation.

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 9173-9202 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Gabriel ◽  
A. Robock

Abstract. To examine the impact of proposed stratospheric geoengineering schemes on the amplitude and frequency of El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variations we examine climate model simulations from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) G1–G4 experiments. Here we compare tropical Pacific behavior under anthropogenic global warming (AGW) using the representative concentration pathway resulting in 4.5 W m−2 radiative forcing at the end of the 21st Century, the RCP4.5 scenario, with that under G1–G4 and under historical model simulations. Climate models under AGW project relatively uniform warming across the tropical Pacific over the next several decades. We find no statistically significant change in ENSO frequency or amplitude under stratospheric geoengineering as compared with those that would occur under ongoing AGW.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-54
Author(s):  
Jake W. Casselman ◽  
Andréa S. Taschetto ◽  
Daniela I.V. Domeisen

AbstractEl Niño-Southern Oscillation can influence the Tropical North Atlantic (TNA), leading to anomalous sea surface temperatures (SST) at a lag of several months. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain this teleconnection. These mechanisms include both tropical and extratropical pathways, contributing to anomalous trade winds and static stability over the TNA region. The TNA SST response to ENSO has been suggested to be nonlinear. Yet the overall linearity of the ENSO-TNA teleconnection via the two pathways remains unclear. Here we use reanalysis data to confirm that the SST anomaly (SSTA) in the TNA is nonlinear with respect to the strength of the SST forcing in the tropical Pacific, as further increases in El Niño magnitudes cease to create further increases of the TNA SSTA. We further show that the tropical pathway is more linear than the extratropical pathway by sub-dividing the inter-basin connection into extratropical and tropical pathways. This is confirmed by a climate model participating in the CMIP5. The extratropical pathway is modulated by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the location of the SSTA in the Pacific, but this modulation insufficiently explains the nonlinearity in TNA SSTA. As neither extratropical nor tropical pathways can explain the nonlinearity, this suggests that external factors are at play. Further analysis shows that the TNA SSTA is highly influenced by the preconditioning of the tropical Atlantic SST. This preconditioning is found to be associated with the NAO through SST-tripole patterns.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jialin Lin ◽  
Taotao Qian

AbstractThe El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant interannual variability of Earth’s climate system and plays a central role in global climate prediction. Outlooks of ENSO and its impacts often follow a two-tier approach: predicting ENSO sea surface temperature anomaly in tropical Pacific and then predicting its global impacts. However, the current picture of ENSO global impacts widely used by forecasting centers and atmospheric science textbooks came from two earliest surface station datasets complied 30 years ago, and focused on the extreme phases rather than the whole ENSO lifecycle. Here, we demonstrate a new picture of the global impacts of ENSO throughout its whole lifecycle based on the rich latest satellite, in situ and reanalysis datasets. ENSO impacts are much wider than previously thought. There are significant impacts unknown in the previous picture over Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The so-called “neutral years” are not neutral, but are associated with strong sea surface temperature anomalies in global oceans outside the tropical Pacific, and significant anomalies of land surface air temperature and precipitation over all the continents.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksey Yu Sadekov ◽  
Raja Ganeshram ◽  
Laetitia Pichevin ◽  
Rose Berdin ◽  
Erin McClymont ◽  
...  

Nature ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 424 (6946) ◽  
pp. 271-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim M. Cobb ◽  
Christopher D. Charles ◽  
Hai Cheng ◽  
R. Lawrence Edwards

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document