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Mechanisms of change in ENSO-induced tropical Pacific rainfall variability in a warming climate

Nature Geoscience volume 8, pages 922–926 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a mode of natural variability that has considerable impacts on global climate and ecosystems1,2,3,4, through rainfall variability in the tropical Pacific and atmospheric teleconnections5. In response to global warming, ENSO-driven rainfall variability is projected to intensify over the central-eastern Pacific but weaken over the western Pacific, whereas ENSO-related sea surface temperature variability is projected to decrease6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14. Here, we explore the mechanisms that lead to changes in ENSO-driven rainfall variability in the tropical Pacific in response to global warming, with the help of a moisture budget decomposition for simulations from eighteen state-of-the-art climate models15. We identify two opposing mechanisms that approximately offset each other: the increase in mean-state moisture content associated with surface warming strengthens ENSO-related rainfall anomalies7, whereas the projected reduction in ENSO-related variability of sea surface temperatures suppresses rainfall. Two additional effects—spatially non-uniform changes in background sea surface temperatures and structural changes in sea surface temperature related to ENSO—both enhance central-eastern Pacific rainfall variability while dampening variability in the western Pacific, in nearly equal amounts. Our decomposition method may be generalized to investigate how rainfall variability would change owing to nonlinear interactions between background sea surface temperatures and their variability.

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Figure 1: The simulated historical and changes in ENSO-related SST and ENSO-driven rainfall anomalies in the MME.
Figure 2: Components of ENSO rainfall changes and their relationship with ENSO circulation.
Figure 3: Amplitude changes in ENSO SST and ENSO circulation.
Figure 4: Structural changes in ENSO SST and ENSO circulation.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB955604 and 2014CB953904), the Natural Science Foundation of China (41461164005), and the US National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Monsoon System Research, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

    Ping Huang

  2. Joint Center for Global Change Studies (JCGCS), Beijing 100875, China

    Ping Huang

  3. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA

    Shang-Ping Xie

  4. Physical Oceanography Laboratory/Qingdao Collaborative Innovation Center of Marine Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266003, China

    Shang-Ping Xie

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  1. Ping Huang
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  2. Shang-Ping Xie
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P.H. conceived the study, performed the analyses, built the mechanism and wrote the paper. S.-P.X. contributed to improving the paper.

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Correspondence to Ping Huang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Huang, P., Xie, SP. Mechanisms of change in ENSO-induced tropical Pacific rainfall variability in a warming climate. Nature Geosci 8, 922–926 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2571

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