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The “normality” of El Niño
Abstract
The amplitude of the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) would be normally distributed if the coupled Pacific ocean‐atmosphere were a linear system forced by Gaussian weather noise. Moment estimates of skewness and kurtosis demonstrate that this is not the case for monthly mean anomalies in Pacific sea surface temperatures during 1950–97. The noted predominance of El Niño events compared to La Niña events is related to the high skewness in the eastern Pacific. Skewness and kurtosis both exhibit an intriguing geographical variation from positive in the eastern to negative in the western Pacific. We have also examined Niño‐3 indices generated by three climate models having widely different complexity. These exhibit a wide range of skewness and kurtosis values rather different from those found for the observations. Skewness and kurtosis can be used to diagnose non‐linear processes and provide powerful tools for validating models, and for testing observed sea‐surface temperatures for the presence of possible climate change.
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Cited by
Cai, W., Santoso, A., Wang, G., Yeh, S.-W., An, S.-I., Cobb, K. M., Collins, M., Guilyardi, E., Jin, F.-F., Kug, J.-S., et al. (2015) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/nclimate2743 · Cited by 891
Ocean Circulation and Tropical Variability in the Coupled Model ECHAM5/MPI-OM
Jungclaus, J. H., Keenlyside, N., Botzet, M., Haak, H., Luo, J.-J., Latif, M., Marotzke, J., Mikolajewicz, U., & Roeckner, E. (2006) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/jcli3827.1 · Cited by 834
A Cautionary Note on the Use of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov Test for Normality
Steinskog, D. J., Tjøstheim, D. B., & Kvamstø, N. G. (2007) · Monthly Weather Review · doi:10.1175/mwr3326.1 · Cited by 267
Analysis of the non-linearity in the pattern and time evolution of El Niño southern oscillation
Dommenget, D., Bayr, T., & Frauen, C. (2013) · Climate Dynamics · doi:10.1007/s00382-012-1475-0 · Cited by 252
Climate fluctuations of tropical coupled systems: the role of ocean dynamics
Chang, P., Yamagata, T., Schopf, P., Behera, S. K., Carton, J., Kessler, W. S., Meyers, G., Qu, T., Schott, F., Shetye, S., et al. (2006) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/jcli3903.1 · Cited by 244
Metadata
- Authors
- Burgers, G., & Stephenson, D. B.
- Venue
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Published
- 1999-04-15
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1027-1030
- ISSN
- 0094-8276 (ISSN-L)
- 1944-8007
- OpenAlex
- W2046589183
- Cited by
- 299
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Burgers, G., & Stephenson, D. B. (1999). The “normality” of El Niño. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1029/1999gl900161
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
