Jan 19, 2014
Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming
by
,
Nature Climate Change
- Presents climate modeling evidence for a doubling in the occurrences in the future in response to greenhouse warming
- Estimates the change by aggregating results from climate models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phases 3 (CMIP3) and 5 (CMIP5) multi-model databases, and a perturbed physics ensemble
- Finds the increased frequency arises from a projected surface warming over the eastern equatorial Pacific that occurs faster than in the surrounding ocean waters, facilitating more occurrences of atmospheric convection in the eastern equatorial region