El Niño in a changing climate
Abstract
El Niño events, characterized by anomalous warming in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, have global climatic teleconnections and are the most dominant feature of cyclic climate variability on subdecadal timescales. Understanding changes in the frequency or characteristics of El Niño events in a changing climate is therefore of broad scientific and socioeconomic interest. Recent studies show that the canonical El Niño has become less frequent and that a different kind of El Niño has become more common during the late twentieth century, in which warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central Pacific are flanked on the east and west by cooler SSTs. This type of El Niño, termed the central Pacific El Niño (CP-El Niño; also termed the dateline El Niño, El Niño Modoki or warm pool El Niño), differs from the canonical eastern Pacific El Niño (EP-El Niño) in both the location of maximum SST anomalies and tropical-midlatitude teleconnections. Here we show changes in the ratio of CP-El Niño to EP-El Niño under projected global warming scenarios from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 multi-model data set. Using calculations based on historical El Niño indices, we find that projections of anthropogenic climate change are associated with an increased frequency of the CP-El Niño compared to the EP-El Niño. When restricted to the six climate models with the best representation of the twentieth-century ratio of CP-El Niño to EP-El Niño, the occurrence ratio of CP-El…
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Past research has shown significant decadal variability in the frequency of noncanonical El Niños relative to canonical events.
“Past research has shown significant decadal variability in the frequency of noncanonical El Niños relative to canonical events.”
From Impacts of canonical and Modoki El Niño on tropical Atlantic SST (2014) · cites this paper as Yeh et al., 2009
The ERSST.v3b data set extending back more than a century has been used successfully in past El Niño studies.
“The ERSST.v3b data set extending back more than a century has been used successfully in past El Niño studies [e.g., Yeh et al., 2009;Messi e and Chavez, 2011].”
From Impacts of canonical and Modoki El Niño on tropical Atlantic SST (2014) · cites this paper as Yeh et al., 2009
Recent studies indicate a growing frequency of Modoki ENSO events relative to canonical events in recent years.
“Recent studies indicate a growing frequency of Modoki ENSO events relative to canonical events in recent years [Yeh et al., 2009;Ashok et al., 2007;Kao and Yu, 2009;Kug et al., 2009;Lee and McPhaden, 2010].”
From Impacts of canonical and Modoki El Niño on tropical Atlantic SST (2014) · cites this paper as Yeh et al., 2009
Cites
The Jackknife, the Bootstrap and Other Resampling Plans
Efron, B. (1982) · Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · doi:10.1137/1.9781611970319 · Cited by 8,120 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity
Moritz, M. A., Parisien, M.-A., Batllori, E., Krawchuk, M. A., Van Dorn, J., Ganz, D. J., & Hayhoe, K. (2012) · Ecosphere · doi:10.1890/es11-00345.1 · Cited by 959 · see citing works
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 · see citing works
Self-citationImpacts 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
Gutiérrez-Fonseca, P. E., Ramírez, A., & Pringle, C. M. (2018) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0191781 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
- Authors
- Yeh, S.-W., Kug, J.-S., Dewitte, B., Kwon, M.-H., Kirtman, B. P., & Jin, F.-F.
- Affiliations
- Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KR)
- Laboratoire d’Études en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales (FR)
- University of Miami (US)
- University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (US)
- Corresponding author
- Yeh, Sang-Wook
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2009-09-24
- Volume
- 461
- Issue
- 7263
- Pages
- 511-514
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2023875545
- Cited by
- 1,592
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 49 · 2025: 79 · 2024: 79 · 2023: 81 · 2022: 104 · 2021: 121 · 2020: 137 · 2019: 97 · 2018: 102 · 2017: 100 · 2016: 103 · 2015: 93 · 2014: 110 · 2013: 117 · 2012: 97
- FWCI
- 62.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- erratum (2009-12-03)
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Partenariat Canadien Contre Le Cancer
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- 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 › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Climate Change and Environmental Impact
- Keywords
- El Niño Modoki, central Pacific El Niño, eastern Pacific El Niño, anthropogenic climate change, climate change projections, sea surface temperature anomalies, climate change attribution, tropical Pacific warming, ENSO teleconnections, ENSO
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
