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The cause of the fragile relationship between the Pacific El Niño and the Atlantic Niño

Nature volume 443, pages 324–328 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

El Niño, the most prominent climate fluctuation at seasonal-to-interannual timescales, has long been known to have a remote impact on climate variability in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, but a robust influence is found only in the northern tropical Atlantic region1. Fluctuations in the equatorial Atlantic are dominated by the Atlantic Niño2,3, a phenomenon analogous to El Niño, characterized by irregular episodes of anomalous warming during the boreal summer. The Atlantic Niño strongly affects seasonal climate prediction in African countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea4,5. The relationship between El Niño and the Atlantic Niño is ambiguous and inconsistent. Here we combine observational and modelling analysis to show that the fragile relationship is a result of destructive interference between atmospheric and oceanic processes in response to El Niño. The net effect of El Niño on the Atlantic Niño depends not only on the atmospheric response that propagates the El Niño signal to the tropical Atlantic, but also on a dynamic ocean–atmosphere interaction in the equatorial Atlantic that works against the atmospheric response. These results emphasize the importance of having an improved ocean-observing system in the tropical Atlantic, because our ability to predict the Atlantic Niño will depend not only on our knowledge of conditions in the tropical Pacific, but also on an accurate estimate of the state of the upper ocean in the equatorial Atlantic.

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Figure 1: Tropospheric and surface temperature response of the tropical Atlantic to El Niño revealed by a regression analysis.
Figure 2: Atmospheric response to the 1982/83 and 1997/98 El Niños.
Figure 3: Observed response of tropical Atlantic zonal wind stress to El Niño.
Figure 4: The simulated tropical Atlantic response to El Niño in three ensembles of numerical experiments.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. C. H. Chiang for a discussion about the tropospheric temperature mechanism. This work was supported by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program and by the NSF Climate Dynamics Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Oceanography,

    Ping Chang, Yue Fang, Link Ji & Howard Seidel

  2. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 77843, USA

    R. Saravanan

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  1. Ping Chang
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  2. Yue Fang
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  3. R. Saravanan
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Correspondence to Ping Chang.

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Chang, P., Fang, Y., Saravanan, R. et al. The cause of the fragile relationship between the Pacific El Niño and the Atlantic Niño. Nature 443, 324–328 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05053

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