El Nino modulations over the past centuries
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Material Information

Title:
El Nino modulations over the past centuries
Series Title:
Nature Climate Change Volume 3
Creator:
Jianbao Li
Shang-Ping Xie
Edward R. Cook
Mariano S. Morales
Duncan R. Christie
Nathaniel C. Johnson
Fahu Chen
Rosanne D'Arrigo
Anthony M. Fowler
Xiaohua Gou
Keyan Fang
Publisher:
Macmillan Publishers Limited
Publication Date:
Language:
English

Notes

Abstract:
Predicting how the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will change with global warming is of enormous importance to society1–4. ENSO exhibits considerable natural variability at interdecadal–centennial timescales5. Instrumental records are too short to determine whether ENSO has changed6 and existing reconstructions are often developed without adequate tropical records. Here we present a seven-century-long ENSO reconstruction based on 2,222 tree-ring chronologies from both the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres. The inclusion of tropical records enables us to achieve unprecedented accuracy, as attested by high correlations with equatorial Pacific corals7,8 and coherent modulation of global teleconnections that are consistent with an independent Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction9. Our data indicate that ENSO activity in the late twentieth century was anomalously high over the past seven centuries, suggestive of a response to continuing global warming. Climate models disagree on the ENSO response to global warming3,4, suggesting that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations. Illustrating the radiative effect, our reconstruction reveals a robust ENSOresponse to large tropical eruptions, with anomalous cooling in the east-central tropical Pacific in the year of eruption, followed by anomalous warming one year after. Our observations provide crucial constraints for improving climate models and their future projections.

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Source Institution:
Florida International University
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