An official website of the United States government
Abstract In light of a warming climate, the complexity of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) makes its prediction a challenge. In addition to various flavors of ENSO, oceanic warming in the central and eastern tropical Pacific is not always accompanied by corresponding atmospheric anomalies; that is, the atmosphere and ocean remain uncoupled. Such uncoupled warm events as happened in 1979, 2004, 2014, and 2018 are rare and represent an unusual form of ENSO diversity. A weaker zonal sea surface temperature anomaly gradient across the tropical Pacific compared to a conventional El Niño may partially account for the decoupling. Also, the uncoupled warm events typically start late in the calendar year, which raises the possible influence of seasonality in background conditions for the lack of coupling. Without coupling, the impact of the warming in the central and eastern tropical Pacific on extratropical climate is different from that of its coupled counterpart.
more »
« less
Explained predictions of strong eastern Pacific El Niño events using deep learning
Abstract Global and regional impacts of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) are sensitive to the details of the pattern of anomalous ocean warming and cooling, such as the contrasts between the eastern and central Pacific. However, skillful prediction of such ENSO diversity remains a challenge even a few months in advance. Here, we present an experimental forecast with a deep learning model (IGP-UHM AI model v1.0) for theE(eastern Pacific) andC(central Pacific) ENSO diversity indices, specialized on the onset of strong eastern Pacific El Niño events by including a classification output. We find that higher ENSO nonlinearity is associated with better skill, with potential implications for ENSO predictability in a warming climate. When initialized in May 2023, our model predicts the persistence of El Niño conditions in the eastern Pacific into 2024, but with decreasing strength, similar to 2015–2016 but much weaker than 1997–1998. In contrast to the more typical El Niño development in 1997 and 2015, in addition to the ongoing eastern Pacific warming, an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence analysis for 2023 identifies weak warm surface, increased sea level and westerly wind anomalies in the western Pacific as precursors, countered by warm surface and southerly wind anomalies in the northern Atlantic.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10477106
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly skewness encapsulates the nonlinear processes of strong ENSO events and affects future climate projections. Yet, its response to CO2 forcing remains not well understood. Here, we find ENSO skewness hysteresis in a large ensemble CO2 removal simulation. The positive SST skewness in the central-to-eastern tropical Pacific gradually weakens (most pronounced near the dateline) in response to increasing CO2, but weakens even further once CO2 is ramped down. Further analyses reveal that hysteresis of the Intertropical Convergence Zone migration leads to more active and farther eastward-located strong eastern Pacific El Niño events, thus decreasing central Pacific ENSO skewness by reducing the amplitude of the central Pacific positive SST anomalies and increasing the scaling effect of the eastern Pacific skewness denominator, i.e., ENSO intensity, respectively. The reduction of eastern Pacific El Niño maximum intensity, which is constrained by the SST zonal gradient of the projected background El Niño-like warming pattern, also contributes to a reduction of eastern Pacific SST skewness around the CO2 peak phase. This study highlights the divergent responses of different strong El Niño regimes in response to climate change.more » « less
-
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, manifested by the great swings of large-scale sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies over the equatorial central to eastern Pacific oceans, is a major source of interannual global shifts in climate patterns and weather activities. ENSO’s SST anomalies exhibit remarkable spatiotemporal pattern diversity (STPD), with their spatial pattern diversity dominated by Central Pacific (CP) and Eastern Pacific (EP) El Niño events and their temporal diversity marked by different timescales and intermittency in these types of events. By affecting various Earth system components, ENSO and its STPD yield significant environmental, ecological, economic, and societal impacts over the globe. The basic dynamics of ENSO as a canonical oscillator generated by coupled ocean–atmosphere interactions in the tropical Pacific have been largely understood. A minimal simple conceptual model such as the recharge oscillator paradigm provides means for quantifying the linear and nonlinear seasonally modulated growth rate and frequency together with ENSO’s state-dependent noise forcing for understanding ENSO’s amplitude and periodicity, boreal winter-time phase locking, and warm/cold phase asymmetry. However, the dynamical mechanisms explaining the key features of ENSO STPD associated with CP and EP events remain to be better understood. This article provides a summary of the recent active research on the dynamics of ENSO STPD together with discussions on challenges and outlooks for theoretical, diagnostic, and numerical modeling approaches to advance our understanding and modeling of ENSO, its STPD, and their broad impacts.more » « less
-
Abstract El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences seasonal Atlantic tropical cyclone (TC) activity by impacting environmental conditions important for TC genesis. However, the influence of future climate change on the teleconnection between ENSO and Atlantic TCs is uncertain, as climate change is expected to impact both ENSO and the mean climate state. We used the Weather Research and Forecasting Model on a tropical channel domain to simulate 5-member ensembles of Atlantic TC seasons in historical and future climates under different ENSO conditions. Experiments were forced with idealized sea surface temperature configurations based on the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Large Ensemble representing: a monthly varying climatology, eastern Pacific El Niño, central Pacific El Niño, and La Niña. The historical simulations produced fewer Atlantic TCs during eastern Pacific El Niño compared to central Pacific El Niño, consistent with observations and other modeling studies. For each ENSO state, the future simulations produced a similar teleconnection with Atlantic TCs as in the historical simulations. Specifically, La Niña continues to enhance Atlantic TC activity, and El Niño continues to suppress Atlantic TCs, with greater suppression during eastern Pacific El Niño compared to central Pacific El Niño. In addition, we found a decrease in the Atlantic TC frequency in the future relative to historical regardless of ENSO state, which was associated with a future increase in northern tropical Atlantic vertical wind shear and a future decrease in the zonal tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) gradient, corresponding to a more El Niño–like mean climate state. Our results indicate that ENSO will remain useful for seasonal Atlantic TC prediction in the future.more » « less
-
Abstract This study presents a description of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Variability (PDV) in a multicentury preindustrial simulation of the Community Earth System Model Version 2 (CESM2). The model simulates several aspects of ENSO relatively well, including dominant timescale, tropical and extratropical precursors, composite evolution of El Niño and La Niña events, and ENSO teleconnections. The good model representation of ENSO spectral characteristics is consistent with the spatial pattern of the anomalous equatorial zonal wind stress in the model, which results in the correct adjustment timescale of the equatorial thermocline according to the delayed/recharge oscillator paradigms, as also reflected in the realistic time evolution of the equatorial Warm Water Volume. PDV in the model exhibits a pattern that is very similar to the observed, with realistic tropical and South Pacific signatures which were much weaker in some of the CESM2 predecessor models. The tropical component of PDV also shows an association with ENSO decadal modulation which is similar to that found in observations. However, the ENSO amplitude is about 30% larger than observed in the preindustrial CESM2 simulation, and even larger in the historical ensemble, perhaps as a result of anthropogenic influences. In contrast to observations, the largest variability is found in the central Pacific rather than in the eastern Pacific, a discrepancy that somewhat hinders the model's ability to represent a full diversity in El Niño spatial patterns and appears to be associated with an unrealistic confinement of the precipitation anomalies to the western Pacific.more » « less
