Identification

Title

Will there be a significant change to El Niño in the 21st century?

Abstract

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) response to anthropogenic climate change is assessed in the following 1° nominal resolution Community Climate System Model, version 4 (CCSM4) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) simulations: twentieth-century ensemble, preindustrial control, twenty-first-century projections, and stabilized 2100-2300 "extension runs." ENSO variability weakens slightly with CO₂; however, various significance tests reveal that changes are insignificant at all but the highest CO₂ levels. Comparison with the 1850 control simulation suggests that ENSO changes may become significant on centennial time scales; the lack of signal in the twentieth- versus twenty-first-century ensembles is due to their limited duration. Changes to the mean state are consistent with previous studies: a weakening of the subtropical wind stress curl, an eastward shift of the tropical convective cells, a reduction in the zonal SST gradient, and an increase in vertical thermal stratification take place as CO₂ increases. The extratropical thermocline deepens throughout the twenty-first century, with the tropical thermocline changing slowly in response. The adjustment time scale is set by the relevant ocean dynamics, and the delay in its effect on ENSO variability is not diminished by increasing ensemble size. The CCSM4 results imply that twenty-first-century simulations may simply be too short for identification of significant tropical variability response to climate change. An examination of atmospheric teleconnections, in contrast, shows that the remote influences of ENSO do respond rapidly to climate change in some regions, particularly during boreal winter. This suggests that changes to ENSO impacts may take place well before changes to oceanic tropical variability itself become significant.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

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http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7z32086

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

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Classification of spatial data and services

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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date type

publication

effective date

2012-03-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2012 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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None

Responsible organisations

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contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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