Natural variability of the central Pacific El Niño event on multi-centennial timescales
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[1] There is an evidence of the increasing intensity as well as occurrence frequency of the so-called central Pacific (CP) El Niño events since the 1990s. We examine whether such an increase in the frequency of CP El Niño may be a manifestation of natural climate variability. A control simulation of the Kiel Climate Model, run for 4200 years with the present values of greenhouse gases, exhibit large variations of the occurrence frequency of the CP El Niño versus the eastern Pacific (EP) El Niño. A model simulates to some extent changes in the occurrence ratio of CP and EP El Niño in comparison with the observations. Therefore, we can not exclude the possibility that an increasing of occurrence frequency of CP El Niño during recent decades in the observation could be a part of natural variability in the tropical climate system.
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Later studies indicate that the trend of growing intensity of central Pacific warming events likely arises from unresolved natural decadal variability.
“though later studies indicate that this trend likely arises from unresolved natural decadal variability [McPhaden et al., 2011;Yeh et al., 2011].”
From Impacts of canonical and Modoki El Niño on tropical Atlantic SST (2014) · cites this paper as Yeh et al., 2011
The Statistics section (§3.2, paragraph 12) finds that the observed increase in the frequency ratio of central-Pacific to eastern-Pacific El Niño events could be part of natural variability. It does not establish that the trend in event intensity likely arises from natural decadal variability; the authors say only that a natural explanation for the frequency change cannot be excluded. (LLM, conf=0.88)
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Impacts of canonical and Modoki El Niño on tropical Atlantic SST
Amaya, D. J., & Foltz, G. R. (2014) · Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans · doi:10.1002/2013jc009476 · Cited by 63 · see citing works
- Authors
- Yeh, S.-W., Kirtman, B. P., Kug, J.-S., Park, W., & Latif, M.
- Affiliations
- Hanyang University (KR)
- University of Miami (US)
- Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KR)
- GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (DE)
- Venue
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Published
- 2011-01
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- n/a-n/a
- ISSN
- 0094-8276 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1812303122
- Cited by
- 128
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 19 · 2013: 9 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 11.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Geophysical Research Letters (publishedVersion)
- Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR) (acceptedVersion, other-oa)
- The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journals, Books and Databases (The Royal Society of Chemistry) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Climate variability and models
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Geology and Paleoclimatology Research
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations
- Keywords
- central Pacific El Niño, eastern Pacific El Niño, natural climate variability, Kiel Climate Model, paleoclimate simulation, tropical Pacific climate, greenhouse gas forcing
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