EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Arctic sea-ice loss is projected to lead to more frequent strong El Niño events

Jiping Liu (), Mirong Song, Zhu Zhu, Radley M. Horton, Yongyun Hu and Shang-Ping Xie
Additional contact information
Jiping Liu: University at Albany, State University of New York
Mirong Song: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Zhu Zhu: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Radley M. Horton: Columbia University Earth Institute
Yongyun Hu: Peking University
Shang-Ping Xie: University of California San Diego

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Arctic sea ice has decreased substantially and is projected to reach a seasonally ice-free state in the coming decades. Little is known about whether dwindling Arctic sea ice is capable of influencing the occurrence of strong El Niño, a prominent mode of climate variability with global impacts. Based on time slice coupled model experiments, here we show that no significant change in the occurrence of strong El Niño is found in response to moderate Arctic sea-ice loss that is consistent with satellite observations to date. However, as the ice loss continues and the Arctic becomes seasonally ice-free, the frequency of strong El Niño events increases by more than one third, as defined by gradient-based indices that remove mean tropical Pacific warming induced by the seasonally ice-free Arctic. By comparing our time slice experiments with greenhouse warming experiments, we conclude that at least 37–48% of the increase of strong El Niño near the end of the 21st century is associated specifically with Arctic sea-ice loss. Further separation of Arctic sea-ice loss and greenhouse gas forcing only experiments implies that the seasonally ice-free Arctic might play a key role in driving significantly more frequent strong El Niño events.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32705-2 Abstract (text/html)

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:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-32705-2

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32705-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

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

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-32705-2