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OCEAN–ATMOSPHERE INTERACTION

Refining El Niño projections

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 724–725 (2021)Cite this article

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Climate models disagree on how the year-to-year variability of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation will change in a warmer world. Using a high-resolution climate model with an improved tropical Pacific mean state, research now suggests that El Niño activity tends to get weaker under GHG-induced warming.

Despite advances in El Niño theory and modelling during the past decades, uncertainty in how El Niño will change under global warming persists across several generations of climate models1,2,3. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Christian Wengel and colleagues4 project weakened El Niño activity using a high-resolution climate model that resolves small-scale atmospheric and oceanic processes, adding new insight to the debate.

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Fig. 1: Small-scale processes in the ocean and atmosphere.

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  1. Division of Earth and Climate Sciences, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Shineng Hu

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  1. Shineng Hu
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Correspondence to Shineng Hu.

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Hu, S. Refining El Niño projections. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 724–725 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01126-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01126-2

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