Indian Ocean Dipole: lessons learned from its discovery — Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
  1. Schedule
  2. PLENARY: Toshio Yamagata
  3. Indian Ocean Dipole: lessons learned from its discovery

Indian Ocean Dipole: lessons learned from its discovery (#2)

Toshio Yamagata 1
  1. Application Lab, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Japan

In recent years, weather extremes have been occurring frequently around the world. It is said that this is because natural climate modes giving birth to abnormal weather phenomena have changed their frequency, amplitude and even structure under the influence of global warming. The most prominent among those climate modes is El Niño, which occurs in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Until the end of the twentieth century, it was thought that there was no significant climate mode in the Indian Ocean, which was strongly influenced by the seasonal monsoon. However, in 1999, we showed that there is an important climate mode even in the Indian Ocean, named it Indian Ocean Dipole Mode, and draw an overall picture of its generation, growth, and decay processes. In 2019, just 20 years after its discovery, an extremely strong positive event occurred, which was comparable to the major events in1961, 1994 and 1997, and caused devastating damages to countries around the Indian Ocean, such as Australia, Indonesia, South Sudan, Somalia and Kenya. In my presentation, I would like to explain in plain language the background that led to the discovery of this climate mode, the long road to acceptance by people around the world, and our current level of understanding and prediction skills. The introduction of the Indian Ocean Dipole Mode provided a real breakthrough in the climate research in the Indian Ocean and new directions for the predictability of climate variations and applicability of seasonal climate prediction.

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