The 2015/16 “Super” El Niño Event and Its Climatic Impact

Bing Zhou and Xie Shao ()
Additional contact information
Bing Zhou: National Climate Center, No. 46 Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China
Xie Shao: National Climate Center, No. 46 Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China

Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES), 2017, vol. 05, issue 03, 1-16

Abstract: Climatic monitoring shows that 2015 has been the warmest year around the globe since the first modern observation was conducted in1880. Asia has witnessed its average land surface temperature reaching the highest level since 1901; China has seen the warmest year since 1951 when it had completed the meteorological records; the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere exceeds 400ppm; the ocean thermal capacity sets a new record high; and the global sea surface temperature has also been the highest since 1870. Against the backdrop of global warming, the incidence of strong El Niño and the duration of El Niño in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean have both significantly increased, while the time interval between El Niño and La Niña has shortened. The 2015/16 “Super” El Niño event exceeds previous two “Super” El Niño events in several indexes (e.g. durative event and peak intensity), although the 1982/83 El Niño event keeps the record in terms of the intensity of atmospheric response to the ocean. Influenced by the 2015/16 “Super” El Niño event, the general atmospheric circulation was significantly abnormal with extreme climate events frequently occurring in many places worldwide.

Keywords: “Super” El Niño; global warming; ocean thermal capacity; Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2345748117500178
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:cjuesx:v:05:y:2017:i:03:n:s2345748117500178

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S2345748117500178

Access Statistics for this article

Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES) is currently edited by PAN Jiahua

More articles in Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().