Weakening of the Atlantic Niño variability under global warming

Lander R. Crespo, Arthur Prigent (), Noel Keenlyside, Shunya Koseki, Lea Svendsen, Ingo Richter and Emilia Sánchez-Gómez
Additional contact information
Lander R. Crespo: University of Bergen
Arthur Prigent: GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel
Noel Keenlyside: University of Bergen
Shunya Koseki: University of Bergen
Lea Svendsen: University of Bergen
Ingo Richter: Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, JAMSTEC
Emilia Sánchez-Gómez: Université de Toulouse-Cerfacs-CNRS

Nature Climate Change, 2022, vol. 12, issue 9, 822-827

Abstract: Abstract The Atlantic Niño is one of the most important patterns of interannual tropical climate variability, but how climate change will influence this pattern is not well known due to large climate model biases. Here we show that state-of-the-art climate models robustly predict a weakening of Atlantic Niños in response to global warming, mainly due to a decoupling of subsurface and surface temperature variations as the upper equatorial Atlantic Ocean warms. This weakening is predicted by most (>80%) models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phases 5 and 6 under the highest emission scenarios. Our results indicate a reduction in variability by the end of the century by 14%, and as much as 24–48% when accounting for model errors using a simple emergent constraint analysis. Such a weakening of Atlantic Niño variability will potentially impact climate conditions and the skill of seasonal predictions in many regions.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01453-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:12:y:2022:i:9:d:10.1038_s41558-022-01453-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01453-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().