Abstract
El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) sea surface temperature (SST) variability increased after 1960, influenced by more frequent strong El Niño and La Niña events. Whether such changes are linked to anthropogenic warming, however, is largely unknown. In this Perspective, we consider anthropogenic impacts on ENSO variability in several commonly used modelling designs, which collectively suggest a greenhouse warming-related effect on post-1960 ENSO SST variability. Specifically, a comparison of simulated ENSO SST variability between 1901–1960 and 1961–2020 indicates that more than three quarters of climate models produce an amplitude increase in post-1960 ENSO SST variability, translating into more frequent strong El Niño and La Niña events. Multiple large ensemble experiments further confirm that the simulated post-1960 ENSO amplitude increase (approximately 10%) is not solely due to internal variability. Moreover, multicentury-long simulations under a constant pre-industrial CO2 level suggest that the observed post-1960 ENSO variability is high, sitting in the highest 2.5 and 10 percentiles for eastern Pacific and central Pacific ENSO, respectively. Improvement in model ENSO physics, identification of consistent future and historical change in additional ENSO characteristics and single-forcing large-ensemble experiments are further needed to ascertain climate change impacts on the ENSO.
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Data availability
Data relevant to the paper can be downloaded from 20CR v2c at https://portal.nersc.gov/project/20C_Reanalysis/; CERA-20C at https://apps.ecmwf.int/datsets/dat/cera20c-edmo/levtype=sfc/type=an/; ERA-20C at https://apps.ecmwf.int/datsets/data/era20c-moda/levtype=sfc/type=an/; ERSST v3b at https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.noaa.ersst.v3.html; HadISST v1.1 at https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.hadsst.html; COBE at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.cobe.html; ORA-s3 at http://apdrc.soest.hawaii.edu/datadoc/ecmwf_oras3.php; ORA-s4 at https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/oras4-ecmwf-ocean-reanalysis-and-derived-ocean-heat-content and 111 CMIP6 database at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip6/.
Code availability
Codes for calculating EOF can be downloaded from: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1d2R8wKpFNW-vMIfoJsbqIGPIBd9Z_8rj.
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Acknowledgements
This project is supported by the Science and Technology Innovation Project of Laoshan Laboratory (LSKJ202203300) and the Strategic Priority Research Programme of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB 40030000). T.G. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) project (42206209, 42276006) and China National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents (BX20220279). L.W., X.L. and B.G. are supported by the NSFC projects (41490643, 41490640, U1606402 and 41521091). W.C., G.W., B.N. and A.S. are supported by CSHOR, a joint research Center for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research between QNLM and CSIRO. A.S., B.N. and G.W. are supported by the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program (NESP). M.C. was supported by a grant from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/S004645/1). The authors acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and the authors thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. The authors are also grateful to various reanalysis groups for making the data sets available to us. PMEL contribution no. 4957.
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W.C. conceived the article and wrote the initial manuscript in discussion with T.G., B.N. and L.W. B.N. and T.G. performed analysis and generated final figures. All authors contributed to interpreting findings, discussion of the associated dynamics and improvement of this paper.
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Cai, W., Ng, B., Geng, T. et al. Anthropogenic impacts on twentieth-century ENSO variability changes. Nat Rev Earth Environ 4, 407–418 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00427-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00427-8
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