Greenhouse warming may suppress Atlantic Ocean Niño/Niña, unlike in the Indian and Pacific oceans

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-09-02 01:00

Australia; TAS

Photo by Fer Nando on Unsplash

Unlike in the Indian and Pacific oceans, greenhouse warming may reduce extreme Niño/Niña events in the Atlantic Ocean, according to Aussie researchers. Using computer simulations they found that the seasonal variations were suppressed under increased warming. They say this would result in fewer extreme events as a result of Atlantic Niño/Niña, which is in contrast to the Indian and Pacific oceans where increased greenhouse warming is predicted to increase the La Niña/El Niño, and Indian Ocean Dipole variability, and as a result the frequency of extreme events.

Media release

From:

Journal/
conference: Nature Climate Change

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: CSIRO

Funder: This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) project (grant nos. 41976005, 41876008, 41730534), Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB40000000). W.C., B.N. and G.W. are supported by the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research, a joint research centre between QNLM and CSIRO. G.W. is also supported by the Australian government under the National Environmental Science Program. F.J. is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2020YFA0608801) and Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2021205). Y.Y. is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. Computation is supported by the Center for High Performance Computing and System Simulation, Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Qingdao).

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