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The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant and most consequential climate variation on Earth, and is characterized by warming of equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) during the El Niño phase and cooling during the La Niña phase. ENSO events tend to have a centre—corresponding to the location of the maximum SST anomaly—in either the central equatorial Pacific (5° S–5° N, 160° E–150° W) or the eastern equatorial Pacific (5° S–5° N, 150°–90° W); these two distinct types of ENSO event are referred to as the CP-ENSO and EP-ENSO regimes, respectively. How the ENSO may change under future greenhouse warming is unknown, owing to a lack of inter-model agreement over the response of SSTs in the eastern equatorial Pacific to such warming. Here we find a robust increase in future EP-ENSO SST variability among CMIP5 climate models that simulate the ...
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The climate of South America (SA) has long held an intimate connection with El Niño, historically describing anomalously warm sea-surface temperatures off the coastline of Peru. Indeed, throughout SA, precipitation and temperature exhibit a substantial, yet regionally diverse, relationship with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). For example, El Niño is typically accompanied by drought in the Amazon and north-eastern SA, but flooding in the tropical west coast and south-eastern SA, with marked socio-economic effects. In this Review, we synthesize the understanding of ENSO teleconnections to SA. Recent efforts have sought improved understanding of ocean–atmosphere processes that govern the impact, inter-event and decadal variability, and responses to anthropogenic warming. ENSO’s impacts have been found to vary markedly, affected not only by ENSO diversity, but also by modes...
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Publicado 2020
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While there is evidence that ENSO activity will increase in association with the increased vertical stratification due to global warming, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here we investigate this issue using the simulations of the NCAR Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble (CESM-LE) Project focusing on strong El Niño events of the Eastern Pacific (EP) that can be associated to flooding in Northern and Central Peru. It is shown that, in the warmer climate, the duration of strong EP El Niño events peaking in boreal winter is extended by two months, which results in significantly more events peaking in February–March–April (FMA), the season when the climatological Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone is at its southernmost location. This larger persistence of strong EP events is interpreted as resulting from both a stronger recharge process and a more effective thermocline f...
4
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Publicado 2019
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Natural variability and change of the Earth’s climate have significant global societal impacts. With its large heat and carbon capacity and relatively slow dynamics, the ocean plays an integral role in climate, and provides an important source of predictability at seasonal and longer timescales. In addition, the ocean provides the slowly evolving ower boundary to the atmosphere, driving, and modifying atmospheric weather. Understanding and monitoring ocean climate variability and change, to constrain and initialize models as well as identify model biases for improved climate hindcasting and prediction, requires a scale-sensitive, and long-term observing system. A climate observing system has requirements that significantly differ from, and sometimes are orthogonal to, those of other applications. In general terms, they can be summarized by the simultaneous need for both large spatial a...
