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Central Pacific El Niño and decadal climate change in the North Pacific Ocean

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 762–765 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

Decadal fluctuations of the ocean and atmosphere over the North Pacific Ocean significantly affect the weather and climate of North America and Eurasia. They also cause transitions between different states of marine ecosystems across the Pacific Ocean1,2,3. An important fraction of North Pacific low-frequency variability is linked to the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation4, a climate pattern associated with decadal fluctuations of the ocean circulation. Decadal variations in the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation are characterized by a pattern of sea surface temperature anomalies that resemble the central Pacific El Niño, a dominant mode of interannual variability with far-reaching effects on global climate patterns5,6,7. Here we use an ensemble of simulations with a coupled ocean–atmosphere model to show that the sea surface temperature anomalies associated with central Pacific El Niño force changes in the extra-tropical atmospheric circulation. These changes in turn drive the decadal fluctuations of the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation. Given that central Pacific El Niño events could become more frequent with increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere8, we infer that the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation may play an increasingly important role in shaping Pacific climate and marine ecosystems in the twenty-first century.

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Figure 1: Spatial structure of SST anomalies of the CPW El Niño and the NPGO.
Figure 2: The atmospheric forcing of the NPGO.
Figure 3: Tropical Pacific SST anomaly forcing pattern for the AGCM–ML SLPHI.
Figure 4: Reconstruction of NPGO variance originating from the tropical Pacific.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the NSF OCE-0550266, GLOBEC-0606575, OCE-0452654, OCE-0452692, CCS-LTER, GLOBEC OCE-0815280, OCE05-50233, NASA NNG05GC98G, Office of Science (BER), DOE DE-FG02-07ER64469 and JAMSTEC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, 311 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA

    E. Di Lorenzo, K. M. Cobb, J. C. Furtado & A. Bracco

  2. International Pacific Research Center and Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA

    N. Schneider

  3. Department of Geography and Environment, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA

    B. T. Anderson

  4. NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado 80305, USA

    M. A. Alexander

  5. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA

    D. J. Vimont

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  1. E. Di Lorenzo
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  4. N. Schneider
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Contributions

E.D.L. and N.S. carried out the analysis. E.D.L., K.M.C., N.S. and B.A. contributed to the writing of the paper. A.B. and J.C.F. contributed to the coupled ocean–atmosphere model. M.A.A. and D.V. contributed to the experimental design and analysis of the atmospheric teleconnection patterns. All authors discussed and commented on the layout and the results of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to E. Di Lorenzo.

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Di Lorenzo, E., Cobb, K., Furtado, J. et al. Central Pacific El Niño and decadal climate change in the North Pacific Ocean. Nature Geosci 3, 762–765 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo984

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