A31E-0104
Effects of Atmospheric Conditions on the Development of the Weak 2014 El Niño
Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Yehui Chang, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States and Siegfried D Schubert, Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Abstract:
The interannual discharge and recharge of warm water volume (WWV) in the near–equatorial Pacific, long considered to be an important predictor of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) at leads of 2-3 seasons, appears in recent years to be a less reliable predictor with WWV-based predictions of ENSO SST having largely failed after 1998. A key example is the extremely large WWV that appeared in the spring of 2014 that failed to develop into the expected strong El Niño in the following seasons. While the ability of sea surface temperature (SST) to influence the atmosphere has been long demonstrated in numerous modeling and observational studies, the precise mechanisms by which the atmosphere feeds back to the ocean to enhance or suppress ENSO development is still unclear. Such atmospheric impacts are examined here for the 2014 El Niño in the context of coupled general circulation model (CGCM) simulations, leading to the identification of ENSO predictability.
