The role of off-equatorial surface temperature anomalies in the 2014 El Niño prediction

Scientific Reports
Jieshun ZhuJames L Kinter

Abstract

The 2014 El Niño, anticipated to be a strong event in early 2014, turned out to be fairly weak. In early 2014, the tropical Pacific exhibited persistent negative SST anomalies in the southeastern Pacific and positive SST anomalies in north, following the pattern of the Southern Pacific Meridional Mode. In this study, we explored the role of the off-equatorial SST anomalies in the 2014 prediction. Our experiments show that 40% of the amplitude error at the peak phase could be attributed to the lack of prediction of negative SST anomalies in the southeastern Pacific. However, the impact of this model error is partially compensated by the absence of the positive SST anomalies in the tropical western North Pacific in the model. The model response to the amplitude of negative southeastern Pacific SST anomalies is nonlinear in terms of equatorial warming, because the enhanced meridional pressure gradient forces very strong meridional winds without accelerating the zonal wind component near the equator. Our study suggests that reliable forecasts of ENSO strongly rely on correctly modeling the meridional SST gradient, as well as its delicate feedback with the zonal (ENSO) mode.

References

Nov 1, 2012·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Jing-Jia LuoYukio Masumoto
Oct 30, 2014·Scientific Reports·Jieshun ZhuJames L Kinter

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Citations

Oct 25, 2016·Scientific Reports·Zhihai ZhengMichelle L'Heureux
Jun 29, 2017·Scientific Reports·Zeng-Zhen HuXiaochun Wang
Jul 18, 2018·Scientific Reports·Sarah InesonAntje Weisheimer
Jun 9, 2017·Scientific Reports·Lin ChenLu Wang
Jun 30, 2018·Nature Communications·Saji N HameedVishnu Thilakan

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