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Playing hide and seek with El Niño

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 791–795 (2015)Cite this article

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A much-anticipated 'monster' El Niño failed to materialize in 2014, whereas an unforeseen strong El Niño is developing in 2015. El Niño continues to surprise us, despite decades of research into its causes. Natural variations most probably account for recent events, but climate change may also have played a role.

The scientific community has invested considerable effort over the past 50 years in studying El Niño, ever since Jacob Bjerknes first described unusual warm events in the tropical Pacific as the consequence of coupled interactions between the ocean and the overlying atmosphere1. El Niño and its cold counterpart La Niña represent the strongest year-to-year climate fluctuation on the planet2. What has motivated so much interest in these climatic siblings (which we collectively refer to as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, cycle) is not only the quest to understand how they work, but also a societal imperative to accurately predict their evolution to help anticipate impacts on lives, property, economic activity and the environment. How ENSO may change in the future owing to greenhouse gas forcing is likewise one of the most compelling problems in climate research today3.

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Figure 1: Evolution of conditions in 2014 in comparison to 1997.
Figure 2: Relationship between upper-ocean heat content and ENSO SST anomalies.
Figure 3: Monthly NINO-3.4 SST anomalies for El Niños since the 1950s.

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Acknowledgements

This is PMEL publication no. 4335.

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  1. M. J. McPhaden is in the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL), Seattle, Washington 98115, USA

    M. J. McPhaden

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  1. M. J. McPhaden
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Correspondence to M. J. McPhaden.

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McPhaden, M. Playing hide and seek with El Niño. Nature Clim Change 5, 791–795 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2775

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