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Divergent El Niño responses to volcanic eruptions at different latitudes over the past millennium

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Abstract

Detection and attribution of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) responses to radiative forcing perturbation are critical for predicting the future change of ENSO under global warming. One of such forcing perturbation is the volcanic eruption. Our understanding of the responses of ENSO system to explosive tropical volcanic eruptions remains controversial, and we know little about the responses to high-latitude eruptions. Here, we synthesize proxy-based ENSO reconstructions, to show that there exist an El Niño-like response to the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and tropical eruptions and a La Niña-like response to the Southern Hemisphere (SH) eruptions over the past millennium. Our climate model simulation results show good agreement with the proxy records. The simulation reveals that due to different meridional thermal contrasts, the westerly wind anomalies can be excited over the tropical Pacific to the south of, at, or to the north of the equator in the first boreal winter after the NH, tropical, or SH eruptions, respectively. Thus, the eastern-Pacific El Niño can develop and peak in the second winter after the NH and tropical eruptions via the Bjerknes feedback. The model simulation only shows a central-Pacific El Niño-like response to the SH eruptions. The reason is that the anticyclonic wind anomaly associated with the SH eruption-induced southeast Pacific cooling will excite westward current anomalies and prevent the development of eastern-Pacific El Niño-like anomaly. These divergent responses to eruptions at different latitudes and in different hemispheres underline the sensitivity of the ENSO system to the spatial structure of radiative disturbances in the atmosphere.

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Adapted from Liu et al. (2016)

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Acknowledgements

We thank Christopher M. Colose and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions. F.L. acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41420104002), the China National 973 Project (2015CB453200), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu (2015CB453200). J.B.L. acknowledges the support from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Project No. 27300514). B.W. acknowledges the support from the National Science Foundation of the US (climate dynamics division Award No. AGS-1540783) and the Global Research Laboratory (GRL) Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea (Grant No. 2011-0021927). This paper is ESMC Contribution No. 173.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth System Modeling Center and Climate Dynamics Research Center, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Fei Liu

  2. Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

    Jinbao Li

  3. Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Atmosphere-Ocean Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, 96825, USA

    Bin Wang & Tim Li

  4. Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment of Ministry of Education, School of Geography Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Jian Liu & Zhiyuan Wang

  5. State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Gang Huang

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  1. Fei Liu
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Correspondence to Fei Liu.

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Liu, F., Li, J., Wang, B. et al. Divergent El Niño responses to volcanic eruptions at different latitudes over the past millennium. Clim Dyn 50, 3799–3812 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3846-z

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