ENSO Response to Greenhouse Forcing — Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

ENSO Response to Greenhouse Forcing (#151)

Wenju Cai 1 2 , Agus Santoso 1 3 , Guojian Wang 1 2 , Lixin Wu 2 , Mat Collins 4 , Matthieu Lengaigne 5 , Scott Power 6 , Axel Timmermann 7 8
  1. Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR), CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
  2. Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography/Institute for Advanced Ocean Studies, Ocean University of China and Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao, China
  3. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science & Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  4. College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences , University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
  5. LOCEAN/IPSL, Sorbonne Universités/UPMC-CNRS-IRD-MNHN, Paris, France
  6. Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  7. Center for Climate Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Busan, South Korea
  8. International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

How the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) responds to an increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has remained an elusive issue for decades.  Climate models produce widely diverging results based on the traditional sea surface temperature metrics of ENSO.  Some models show stronger ENSO, some weaker, some show no clear change.  However, an inter-model consensus can emerge by steering away from these static measures, and more carefully examining the governing processes and key physical characteristics of ENSO.  Associated with relatively strong inter-model agreement in the projected changes of the Pacific mean climate, marked by equatorially enhanced warming and weakened Walker Circulation, an enhancement in ENSO-driven precipitation tends to occur across models.  Such mean-state changes facilitate increased frequency of extreme El Niño events in models that are able to simulate nonlinear properties of ENSO.  In this ensemble of selected models, the frequency of extreme La Niña events is also projected to increase, as facilitated by faster warming of the Maritime Continent than the surrounding ocean waters.  A projected increase in upper-ocean stratification further favours increased Eastern Pacific ENSO variability.  While uncertainties remain due to persistent model biases, these projections underscore a possible heightened impact of ENSO-driven changes in a warming climate. 

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