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El Niño–La Niña cycle and recent trends in continental evaporation

Nature Climate Change volume 4, pages 122–126 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

The hydrological cycle is expected to intensify in response to global warming1,2,3. Yet, little unequivocal evidence of such an acceleration has been found on a global scale4,5,6. This holds in particular for terrestrial evaporation, the crucial return flow of water from land to atmosphere7. Here we use satellite observations to reveal that continental evaporation has increased in northern latitudes, at rates consistent with expectations derived from temperature trends. However, at the global scale, the dynamics of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have dominated the multi-decadal variability. During El Niño, limitations in terrestrial moisture supply result in vegetation water stress and reduced evaporation in eastern and central Australia, southern Africa and eastern South America. The opposite situation occurs during La Niña. Our results suggest that recent multi-year declines in global average continental evaporation8,9 reflect transitions to El Niño conditions, and are not the consequence of a persistent reorganization of the terrestrial water cycle. Future changes in continental evaporation will be determined by the response of ENSO to changes in global radiative forcing, which still remains highly uncertain10,11.

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Figure 1: Interannual variability of E for 1980–2011.
Figure 2: Episodes of prolonged decline in E and their relation to ENSO.
Figure 3: Characteristic response of land-surface conditions to ENSO.

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Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) WACMOS-ET project (contract no. 4000106711/12/I-NB). A.J.T. acknowledges support from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Veni grant 016.111.002). W.A.D.’s contribution is financially supported by ESA’s projects WATCHFUL (4000107122/12/I-NB) and Climate Change Initiative (4000104814/11/I-NB). A.J.D. is supported by the EU FP7 Amazalert project (grant agreement 282664). We thank B. Mueller, M. Jung and M. Reichstein for the multi-model data used in Fig. 1a. We are grateful to the research centres that made the satellite and re-analysis data available, and especially to the FLUXNET and ISMN communities for the in situ measurements used in the validations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK

    Diego G. Miralles

  2. Laboratory of Hydrology and Water Management, Ghent University, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium

    Martinus J. van den Berg & Niko E. C. Verhoest

  3. Department of Earth Sciences, VU University, Amsterdam 1081 HV, The Netherlands

    John H. Gash, Robert M. Parinussa, Richard A. M. de Jeu, Hylke E. Beck & A. Johannes Dolman

  4. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford OX10 8BB, UK

    John H. Gash

  5. Hydrology and Remote Sensing Lab, USDA-ARS, Beltsville, Maryland 20705, USA

    Thomas R. H. Holmes

  6. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Observatoire de Paris, Paris F-75014, France

    Carlos Jiménez

  7. Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna 1040, Austria

    Wouter A. Dorigo

  8. Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen 6708PA, The Netherlands

    Adriaan J. Teuling

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  1. Diego G. Miralles
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Contributions

D.G.M. initiated the study and did the analyses. D.G.M. and T.R.H.H. coded the evaporation methodology, and M.J.v.d.B. and N.E.C.V. its data assimilation scheme. R.M.P., H.E.B., W.A.D. and R.A.M.d.J. provided different sets of data. All co-authors contributed to the editing of the manuscript and to the discussion and interpretation of the results.

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Correspondence to Diego G. Miralles.

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Miralles, D., van den Berg, M., Gash, J. et al. El Niño–La Niña cycle and recent trends in continental evaporation. Nature Clim Change 4, 122–126 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2068

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