The main objective of this article is to establish a new mechanism of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as a self-organizing and self-excitation system, with two highly coupled processes. The first is the oscillation between the two metastable warm (El Nino phase) and cold events (La Nina phase), and the second is the spatiotemporal oscillation of the sea surface temperature (SST) field. The interplay between these two processes gives rises the climate variability associated with the ENSO, leads to both the random and deterministic features of the ENSO, and defines a new natural feedback mechanism, which drives the sporadic oscillation of the ENSO. The new mechanism is rigorously derived using a dynamic transition theory developed recently by the authors, which has also been successfully applied to a wide range of problems in nonlinear sciences.
A non-autonomous stochastic dynamical model approach is developed to describe the seasonal to interannual variability of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). We determine the model coefficients by systematic statistical estimations using partial observations involving only sea surface temperature data. Our approach reproduces the observed seasonal phase locking and its uncertainty, as well as the highly non-Gaussian statistics of ENSO. Finally, we recover the intermittent time series of the hidden processes, including the thermocline depth and the wind bursts.
The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most important phenomena in climate. By studying the fluctuations of surface air temperature within one year between 1979-01-01 and 2016-12-31 of the region (30S-30N, 0E-360E) with eigen-decomposition, we find that the temperature fluctuations are dominated by the two principal modes whose temporal evolutions respond significantly to the ENSO variability. According to introduce a micro-correlation, we find that the coupling between the first principal mode and the temperature fluctuations in the El Nino region could result in different ENSO…
The skill of the statistical as well as physics-based coupled climate models in predicting the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is limited by their inability to represent the observed ENSO nonlinearity. A promising alternative, namely a deterministic nonlinear dynamical model derived from an observed ENSO timeseries, however, has remained elusive. Here we discover such a phenomenological nonlinear dynamical model that embodies known physical processes responsible for the self-sustained quasi-oscillatory character of the ENSO and its observed spectrum of variability. High predictive potentia…
The southern oscillation index (SOI) is a characteristic of the El Nino phenomenon. SOI monthly averaged data is analyzed for the time interval 1866-2000. The tail of the cumulative distribution of the fluctuations of SOI signal is studied in order to characterize the amplitude scaling of the fluctuations and the occurrence of extreme events. Large fluctuations are more likely to occur than the Gaussian distribution would predict. The time scaling of fluctuations is studied by applying the energy spectrum and the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) statistical method. Self-affine properties a…
Contributions of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diversity to Low-Frequency Changes in ENSO Variance
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences（合作环境科学研究所）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）；NOAA/Physical Sciences Laboratory（美国国家海洋和大气管理局物理科学实验室）
Satellite and ground-based observations are used to explore the composite oceanic - atmospheric link known as the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, which is closely associated with extreme weather events (e.g. heat waves, tornadoes, floods and droughts), incidence of epidemic diseases (e.g. malaria), severe coral bleaching, etc. The ENSO temporal evolution depends on the energy exchange between the coupled ocean/atmosphere system. Its cycle has an average period of about four years, but there is considerable modulation of it from several sources and this is not yet fully …
Understanding current global climate requires an understanding of trends both in Earth's atmospheric temperature and the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a characteristic large-scale distribution of warm water in the tropical Pacific Ocean and the dominant mode of year-to-year climate variability (Holbrook et al. 2009. However, despite much effort, the average projection of current climate models has become statistically significantly different from the observed 21st century global surface temperature trend (Fyfe 2013)and has failed to reflect the statistically significant evidence that an…
The emergence of oscillations in models of the El-Niño effect is of utmost relevance. Here we investigate a coupled nonlinear delay differential system modeling theEl-Niño/ Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, which arises through the strong coupling of the ocean-atmosphere system. In particular, we study the temporal patterns of the sea surface temperature anomaly of the two sub-regions. For identical sub-regions we typically observe a co-existence of amplitude and oscillator death behavior for low delays, and heterogeneous oscillations for high delays, when inter-region coupling is weak. …
The importance of the sea ice retreat in the polar regions for the global warming and the role of ice-albedo feedback was recognized by various authors [1,2]. Similar to a recent study of the phenomenon in the Arctic [3] we present a semi-quantitative estimate of the mechanism for the Southern Hemisphere (SH). Using a simple model, we estimate the contribution of ice-albedo feedback to the mean temperature increase in the SH to be 0.5 +/- 0.1 K in the years 1955 to 2015, while from the simultaneous growth of the greenhouse gases (GHG) we derive a direct warming of only 0.2 +/- 0.05 K in the sa…
Recent work has provided ample evidence that global climate dynamics at time-scales between multiple weeks and several years can be severely affected by the episodic occurrence of both, internal (climatic) and external (non-climatic) perturbations. Here, we aim to improve our understanding on how regional to local disruptions of the "normal" state of the global surface air temperature field affect the corresponding global teleconnectivity structure. Specifically, we present an approach to quantify teleconnectivity based on different characteristics of functional climate network analysis. Subse…
Recent $daily$ data of the Southern Oscillation Index have been analyzed. The power spectrum indicates major intrinsic geophysical short periods. We find interesting ``high frequency'' oscillations at 24, 27, 37, 76, 100 and 365 days. In particular the 24 days peaks may correspond to the Branstator-Kushnir wave, the 27 days may be due to the moon effect rotation, the 37 days peaks is most probably related to the Madden and Julian Oscillation. It is not yet clear the explanations for the 76 days which may be associated with interseasonal oscillation in the tropical atmosphere; the 100 days coul…
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most important driver of interannual global climate variability and can trigger extreme weather events and disasters in various parts of the globe. Recently, we have developed two approaches for the early forecasting of El Niño. The climate network-based approach allows forecasting the onset of an El Niño event about 1 year ahead. The complexity-based approach allows additionally to forecast the magnitude of an upcoming El Niño event in the calendar year before. Here we communicate the forecasts of both methods for 2022.
A Hybrid Deep-Learning Model for El Niño Southern Oscillation in the Low-Data Regime
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts（欧洲中期天气预报中心）；NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory（国家海洋大气管理局物理科学实验室）；Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences（环境科学联合研究所）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）；Data Science Department（数据科学系）
Long-term prediction of El Niño-Southern Oscillation using reservoir computing with data-driven realtime filter
Faculty of Sustainable Design, University of Toyama（富山大学可持续设计学部）；The Graduate School of Environment, Life, Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University（冈山大学环境、生命、自然科学及技术研究生院）；Graduate School of Business Administration, Hitotsubashi University（立正大学商学院）；Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University（立正大学经济学研究生院）
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most important driver of climate variability and can trigger extreme weather events and disasters in various parts of the globe. Recently we have developed a network approach, which allows forecasting an El Niño event about 1 year ahead. Here we communicate that since 2012 this network approach, which does not involve any fit parameter, correctly predicted the absence of El Niño events in 2012, 2013 and 2017 as well as the onset of the large El Niño event that started in 2014 and ended in 2016. Our model also correctly forecasted the onset of the …
We study the relationship between the El Niño--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian summer monsoon in ensemble simulations from state-of-the-art climate models, the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM) and the Community Earth System Model (CESM). We consider two simple variables: the Tahiti--Darwin sea-level pressure difference and the Northern Indian precipitation. We utilize ensembles converged to the system's snapshot attractor for analyzing possible changes (i) in the teleconnection between the fluctuations of the two variables, and (ii) in their climatic means. (i) With…
The El Niño phenomenon, synonymously El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), is an anomalous climatic oscillation in the Equatorial Pacific that occurs once every 3-8 years. It affects the earth's climate on a global scale. Whether it is a cyclic or a sporadic event, or whether its apparently random behaviour can be explained by stochastic dynamics have remained matters of debate. Herein ENSO is viewed, unconventionally, as a two-dimensional dynamical system on a desktop. The main features of ENSO: irregularity, interannual variability, and the asymmetry between El Niño and La Niña are captured, …
In a statistical analysis of more than a century of data we find a strong connection between strong warm El Nino winter events and high spring precipitation in a band from Southern England eastwards into Asia. This relationship is an extension of the connection mentioned by Kiladis and Diaz (1989), and much stronger than the winter season teleconnection that has been the subject of other studies. Linear correlation coefficients between DJF NINO3 indices and MAM precipitation are higher than r=0.3 for individual stations, and as high as r=0.49 for an index of precipitation anomalies around 50N …
Many phenomena in the climate system lie in the gray zone between weather and climate: they are not amenable to deterministic forecast, but they still depend on the initial condition. A natural example is medium-range forecasting, which is inherently probabilistic because it lies beyond the deterministic predictability time of the atmosphere, but for which statistically significant prediction can be made which depend on the current state of the system. Similarly, one may ask the probability of occurrence of an El Niño event several months ahead of time. In this paper, we introduce a quantity w…
Different to classical theories which emphasize east--west feedback along the equator, data analyses via the extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition (ESMD) method support a new viewpoint that the El Niño--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle is horizontally dependent, rather than vertically dependent. The consistency between the ocean current changes and sea-surface temperature anomalies results in a current-generating mechanism for El Niño and La Niña events. The corresponding new findings are as follows: (1) The appearance of the Central Equatorial Countercurrent (CECC) and the enhancement o…
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a mode of interannual variability in the coupled equatorial ocean/atmosphere Pacific. El Niño describes a state in which sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific increase and upwelling of colder, deep waters diminishes. El Niño events typically peak in boreal winter, but their strength varies irregularly on decadal time scales. There were exceptionally strong El Niño events in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 that affected weather on a global scale. Widely publicized forecasts in 2014 predicted that the 2015-16 event would occur a year earlier. Pre…
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most prominent interannual climate phenomena. An early and reliable ENSO forecasting remains a crucial goal, due to its serious implications for economy, society, and ecosystem. Despite the development of various dynamical and statistical prediction models in the recent decades, the ``spring predictability barrier'' (SPB) remains a great challenge for long (over 6-month) lead-time forecasting. To overcome this barrier, here we develop an analysis tool, the System Sample Entropy (SysSampEn), to measure the complexity (disorder) of the system…
We develop a theory of three-dimensional slow Rossby waves in rotating spherical density stratified convection. The Rossby waves with frequencies which are much smaller than the rotating frequency, are excited by a non-axisymmetric instability from the equilibrium based on the developed convection. These waves interact with the inertial waves and the density stratified convection. The density stratification is taken into account using the anelastic approximation for very low-Mach-number flows. We study long-term planetary Rossby waves with periods which are larger than two years. We suggest th…
We apply a test for low-dimensional, deterministic dynamics to the Nino 3 time series for the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The test is negative, indicating that the dynamics is high-dimensional/stochastic. However, application of stochastic forcing to a time-delay equation for equatorial-wave dynamics can reproduce this stochastic dynamics and other important aspects of ENSO. Without such stochastic forcing this model yields low-dimensional, deterministic dynamics, hence these results emphasize the importance of the stochastic nature of the atmosphere-ocean interaction in low-dimension…
Two subsystems of the Asian Monsoon: the Indian Summer Monsoon and the Western North Pacific Monsoon, have been analysed using their daily indices ISMI and WNPMI. It is shown that on the intraseasonal time scales the ISMI and WNPMI are dominated by the Hamiltonian distributed chaos with the stretched exponential spectrum: $E(f) \propto \exp-(f/f_0)^β$ and analytical values of the parameter $β=3/4$ and $β=1/2$ correspondingly. The relevant daily indices Niño 3 and Niño 4 (with $β=1/2$) of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Australian Monsoon (AUSM index with $β= 1/2$) have been als…
We demonstrate an alternative correlation between the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and global temperature variation to that shown by McLean et al. [2009]. We show 50% of the variation in RATPAC-A tropospheric temperature (and 54% of HadCRUT3) is explained by a novel cumulative Southern Oscillation Index (cSOI) term in a simple linear regression. We review evidence from physical and statistical research in support of the hypothesis that accumulation of the effects of ENSO can produce natural multi-decadal warming trends. Although it is not possible to reliably determine the relative cont…
The El Nino southern oscillation (ENSO) behavior can be effectively modeled as a response to a 2nd-order Mathieu/Hill differential equation with periodic coefficients describing sloshing of a volume of water. The forcing of the equation derives from QBO, angular momentum changes synchronized with the Chandler wobble, and solar insolation variations. One regime change was identified in 1980. (See floating note)
We consider a highly idealized model for El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability, as introduced in an earlier paper. The model is governed by a delay differential equation for sea surface temperature in the Tropical Pacific, and it combines two key mechanisms that participate in ENSO dynamics: delayed negative feedback and seasonal forcing. We perform a theoretical and numerical study of the model in the three-dimensional space of its physically relevant parameters: propagation period of oceanic waves across the Tropical Pacific, atmosphere-ocean coupling, and strength of seasonal forc…
The relation between El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) perplexes the researchers. Probably, this is due to the default choice on empirical orthogonal function (EOF) method whose outputs are merely static maps without evolution characteristics. To change this situation, the new extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition (ESMD) method is tried. It reveals that: (1) As the ENSO concerned, the key modes are the quarter-decadal and half-decadal ones; (2) As the PDO concerned, the key modes are the half-decadal, decadal and interdecadal ones; (3) The half-deca…
The impact of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the extratropics is investigated in an idealized, reduced-order model that has a tropical and an extratropical module. Unidirectional ENSO forcing is used to mimick the atmospheric bridge between the tropics and the extratropics. The variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere extratropical module is then investigated through the analysis of its pullback attractors (PBAs). This analysis focuses on two types of ENSO forcing generated by the tropical module, one periodic and the other aperiodic. For a substantial range of the ENSO forcing,…
We consider a delay differential equation (DDE) model for El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability. The model combines two key mechanisms that participate in ENSO dynamics: delayed negative feedback and seasonal forcing. We perform stability analyses of the model in the three-dimensional space of its physically relevant parameters. Our results illustrate the role of these three parameters: strength of seasonal forcing $b$, atmosphere-ocean coupling $κ$, and propagation period $τ$ of oceanic waves across the Tropical Pacific. Two regimes of variability, stable and unstable, are separated…
In this study we used the sea surface temperature (SST), El-Nino southern oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) time-series for the time period 1900-2012 in order to investigate plausible manifestation of sharp increases in temperature. It was found that the widely observed warming in the past century did not occur smoothly but sharply. This fact is more pronounced at the latitude zone 30S - 60N during the years 1925/1926 and 1987/1988. We hypothesise that there were two major climate regime shifts in 1925/1926 and 1987/1988 years. During these shifts the mean value of tempe…
