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Strong influence of westerly wind bursts on El Niño diversity

Abstract

Despite the tremendous progress in the theory, observation and prediction of El Niño over the past three decades, the classification of El Niño diversity and the genesis of such diversity are still debated. This uncertainty renders El Niño prediction a continuously challenging task, as manifested by the absence of the large warm event in 2014 that was expected by many. We propose a unified perspective on El Niño diversity as well as its causes, and support our view with a fuzzy clustering analysis and model experiments. Specifically, the interannual variability of sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean can generally be classified into three warm patterns and one cold pattern, which together constitute a canonical cycle of El Niño/La Niña and its different flavours. Although the genesis of the canonical cycle can be readily explained by classic theories, we suggest that the asymmetry, irregularity and extremes of El Niño result from westerly wind bursts, a type of state-dependent atmospheric perturbation in the equatorial Pacific. Westerly wind bursts strongly affect El Niño but not La Niña because of their unidirectional nature. We conclude that properly accounting for the interplay between the canonical cycle and westerly wind bursts may improve El Niño prediction.

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Figure 1: The first three El Niño and La Niña clusters identified by the fuzzy clustering method.
Figure 2: Evolution of observed SST anomaly and WWB along the Equator from January 1961 to December 2010.
Figure 3: Evolution of SST anomaly and WWB along the Equator for the last 125 years of a 200-year model runs.
Figure 4: El Niño and La Niña patterns (left column) and surface-layer heat budgets (right column) from WWB-forced model run.
Figure 5: WWB and warm-water volume anomalies in 11 El Niño years since 1982.
Figure 6: Comparison of evolutions of zonal wind and SST anomaly during the first five months of 2014 and 1997.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program (2013CB430302), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91128204, 41321004), the IPOVAR Project, and the Public Ocean Science and Technology Research Funds (201,105,018). We thank the TAO Project Office of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) for providing the TAO/TRITON data and visualization service. M.A.C. also acknowledges the support of the Office of Naval Research under the research grant of MURI (N00014-12-1-0911).

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D.C. conceived the work and wrote the paper. T.L. carried out data analyses and model experiments. C.F., M.A.C., Y.T., R.M., X.S., Q.W. and L.Z. contributed to the interpretation of the analysis and model results, and to the improvement of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dake Chen.

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Chen, D., Lian, T., Fu, C. et al. Strong influence of westerly wind bursts on El Niño diversity. Nature Geosci 8, 339–345 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2399

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