Abstract
Multi-year La Niña events often induce persistent cool and wet climate over global lands, altering and in some case mitigating regional climate warming impacts. The latest event lingered from mid-2010 to early 2012 and brought about intensive precipitation over many land regions of the world, particularly Australia. This resulted in a significant drop in global mean sea level despite the background upwards trend. This La Niña event is surprisingly predicted out to two years ahead in a few coupled models, even though the predictability of El Niño-Southern Oscillation during 2002–2014 has declined owing to weakened ocean-atmosphere interactions. However, the underlying mechanism for high predictability of this multi-year La Niña episode is still unclear. Experiments based on a climate model that demonstrates a successful two-year forecast of the La Niña support the hypothesis that warm sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans act to intensify the easterly winds in the central equatorial Pacific and largely contribute to the occurrence and two-year predictability of the 2010–2012 La Niña. The results highlight the importance of increased Atlantic-Indian Ocean SSTs for the multi-year La Niña’s predictability under global warming.
Highlights
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) represents the strongest interannual variability of tropical climate and often has large environmental and socio-economic effects worldwide
The La Niña onset is relatively better predicted in the SINTEX-F model but the intensity of the La Niña appears to be overestimated in some forecasts
The high and long-lead predictability of the 2010–12 La Niña event is surprising, since many existing prediction systems have suggested a low predictability of ENSO during 2002–2014, compared to those in previous decades[14,15,16]
Summary
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) represents the strongest interannual variability of tropical climate and often has large environmental and socio-economic effects worldwide. The long-lasting easterly anomalies in the central Pacific during 2010–2012, which favour the occurrence of the multi-year La Niña event[9], are predicted out to two years ahead in the SINTEX-F model (Fig. 2b,d), except that the intensity of the easterly anomalies is generally underestimated.
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