If you are using
Navigator 4.x
or
Internet Explorer 4.x
or
Omni Web 4.x
, this site will not render
correctly!
gfdl's home page > gfdl on-line bibliography > 2003: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 84(7), 911-919
How Predictable is El Niņo?
| Fedorov, A. V., S. L. Harper, S. G. Philander, B. Winter, and A. Wittenberg, 2003: How Predictable is El Niņo? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 84(7), 911-919. |
| Abstract: Nobody anticipated that El Niņo would be weak and prolonged in 1992, but brief and intense in 1997/98. Why are various El Niņo episodes so different, and so difficult to predict? The answer involves the important role played by random atmospheric disturbances (such as westerly wind bursts) in sustaining the weakly damped Southern Oscillation, whose complementary warm and cold phases are, respectively, El Niņo and La Niņa. As in the case of a damped pendulum sustained by modest blows at random times, so the predictability of El Niņo is limited, not by the amplification of errors in initial conditions as in the case of weather, but mainly by atmospheric disturbances interacting with the Southern Oscillation. Given the statistics of the wind fluctuations, the probability distribution function of future sea surface temperature fluctuations in the eastern equatorial Pacific can be determined by means of an ensemble of calculations with a coupled ocean-atmosphere model. Each member of the ensemble starts from the same initial conditions and has, superimposed, a different realization of the noise. Such a prediction, made at the end of 1996, would have assigned a higher likelihood to a moderate event than to the extremely strong event that actually occurred in 1997. (The rapid succession of several westerly wind bursts in early 1997 was a relatively rare phenomenon.) In late 2001, conditions were similar to those in 1996, which suggested a relatively high probability of El Niņo appearing in 2002. Whether the event will be weak or intense depends on the random disturbances that materialize during the year. |