Journal
NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE
Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 111-116Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE2100
Keywords
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Funding
- Australian Climate Change Science Program
- Goyder Research Institute
- CSIRO Office of Chief Executive Science Leader award
- Pacific Australia Climate Change Science Adaptation Programme
- NOAA
- NERC SAPRISE project [NE/I022841/1]
- NSF [1049219]
- ARC Laureate Fellowship scheme [FL100100214]
- China National Natural Science Foundation Key Project [41130859]
- Agence Nationale pour la Recherche [ANR-10-Blanc-616 METRO]
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Div Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences [1034798] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Div Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences [1049219, 1049238] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/I022841/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [NE/I022841/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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El Nino events are a prominent feature of climate variability with global climatic impacts. The 1997/98 episode, often referred to as 'the climate event of the twentieth century'(1,2), and the 1982/83 extreme El Nino(3), featured a pronounced eastward extension of the west Pacific warm pool and development of atmospheric convection, and hence a huge rainfall increase, in the usually cold and dry equatorial eastern Pacific. Such a massive reorganization of atmospheric convection, which we define as an extreme El Nino, severely disrupted global weather patterns, affecting ecosystems(4,5), agriculture(6), tropical cyclones, drought, bushfires, floods and other extreme weather events worldwide(3,7-9). Potential future changes in such extreme El Nino occurrences could have profound socio-economic consequences. Here we present climate modelling evidence for a doubling in the occurrences in the future in response to greenhouse warming. We estimate the change by aggregating results from climate models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phases 3 (CMIP3; ref. 10) and 5 (CMIP5; ref. 11) multi-model databases, and a perturbed physics ensemble(12). The increased frequency arises from a projected surface warming over the eastern equatorial Pacific that occurs faster than in the surrounding ocean waters(13,14), facilitating more occurrences of atmospheric convection in the eastern equatorial region.
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