El Nino in a changing climate SCIE SCOPUS

Cited 1185 time in WEB OF SCIENCE Cited 1273 time in Scopus
Title
El Nino in a changing climate
Author(s)
Yeh, Sang-Wook; Kug, Jong-Seong; Dewitte, Boris; Kwon, Min-Ho; Kirtman, Ben P.; Jin, Fei-Fei
Alternative Author(s)
예상욱; 국종성
Publication Year
2009-09-24
Abstract
El Nino events, characterized by anomalous warming in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, have global climatic teleconnections and are the most dominant feature of cyclic climate variability on subdecadal timescales. Understanding changes in the frequency or characteristics of El Nino events in a changing climate is therefore of broad scientific and socioeconomic interest. Recent studies(1-5) show that the canonical El Nino has become less frequent and that a different kind of El Nino has become more common during the late twentieth century, in which warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central Pacific are flanked on the east and west by cooler SSTs. This type of El Nino, termed the central Pacific El Nino (CP-El Nino; also termed the dateline El Nino(2), El Nino Modoki(3) or warm pool El Nino(5)), differs from the canonical eastern Pacific El Nino (EP-El Nino) in both the location of maximum SST anomalies and tropical-midlatitude teleconnections. Here we show changes in the ratio of CP-El Nino to EP-El Nino under projected global warming scenarios from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 multi-model data set(6). Using calculations based on historical El Nino indices, we find that projections of anthropogenic climate change are associated with an increased frequency of the CP-El Nino compared to the EP-El Nino. When restricted to the six climate models with the best representation of the twentieth-century ratio of CP-El Nino to EP-El Nino, the occurrence ratio of CP-El Nino/EP-El Nino is projected to increase as much as five times under global warming. The change is related to a flattening of the thermocline in the equatorial Pacific.
ISSN
0028-0836
URI
https://sciwatch.kiost.ac.kr/handle/2020.kiost/4249
DOI
10.1038/nature08316
Bibliographic Citation
NATURE, v.461, no.7263, pp.511 - U70, 2009
Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
Subject
PACIFIC RIM; SENSITIVITY; ANOMALIES; MODOKI
Type
Article
Language
English
Document Type
Article
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