El Niño modulations over the past seven centuries
Author: ["Jinbao Li","Shang-Ping Xie","Edward R. Cook","Mariano S. Morales","Duncan A. Christie","Nathaniel C. Johnson","Fahu Chen","Rosanne D’Arrigo","Anthony M. Fowler","Xiaohua Gou","Keyan Fang"]
Publication: Nature Climate Change
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Abstract
The El Niño/Southern Oscillation exhibits considerable natural variability on interdecadal to centennial timescales making it difficult to understand how climate change affects it. A reconstruction now shows there has been anomalously high activity in the late twentieth century, relative to the past seven centuries. This is suggestive of a response to global warming, and will provide constraints to improve climate models and projections. Predicting how the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will change with global warming is of enormous importance to society1,2,3,4. ENSO exhibits considerable natural variability at interdecadal–centennial timescales5. Instrumental records are too short to determine whether ENSO has changed6 and existing reconstructions are often developed without adequate tropical records. Here we present a seven-century-long ENSO reconstruction based on 2,222 tree-ring chronologies from both the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres. The inclusion of tropical records enables us to achieve unprecedented accuracy, as attested by high correlations with equatorial Pacific corals7,8 and coherent modulation of global teleconnections that are consistent with an independent Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction9. Our data indicate that ENSO activity in the late twentieth century was anomalously high over the past seven centuries, suggestive of a response to continuing global warming. Climate models disagree on the ENSO response to global warming3,4, suggesting that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations. Illustrating the radiative effect, our reconstruction reveals a robust ENSO response to large tropical eruptions, with anomalous cooling in the east-central tropical Pacific in the year of eruption, followed by anomalous warming one year after. Our observations provide crucial constraints for improving climate models and their future projections.
Cite this article
Li, J., Xie, SP., Cook, E. et al. El Niño modulations over the past seven centuries. Nature Clim Change 3, 822–826 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1936
