* Astronomy

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Ancient El Niños

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RE: El Niño

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Elusive El Niño arrives

The long-anticipated El Niño has finally arrived, according to forecasters with NOAA's Climate Prediction Centre.
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Amazon fire season 'linked to ocean temperature'

Sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies can help predict the severity of Amazon fire seasons, a study has suggested.
A team of US scientists found there was a correlation between El Nino patterns in the Pacific and fire activity in the eastern Amazon.
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50-million-year-old clam shells provide indications of future of El Niño phenomenon
(14 September 2011)

Earth warming will presumably not lead to a permanent El Niño state in the South Pacific Ocean. This is the conclusion drawn by an international team of researchers after it investigated 50-million-year-old clam shells and wood from the Antarctic. The growth rings of these fossils indicate that there was also a climate rhythm over the South Pacific during the last prolonged interglacial phase of the Earths history resembling the present-day interplay of El Niño and La Niña.
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NASA Satellites Detect Pothole on Road to Higher Seas

Like mercury in a thermometer, ocean waters expand as they warm. This, along with melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, drives sea levels higher over the long term. For the past 18 years, the U.S./French Jason-1, Jason-2 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft have been monitoring the gradual rise of the world's ocean in response to global warming.
While the rise of the global ocean has been remarkably steady for most of this time, every once in a while, sea level rise hits a speed bump. This past year, it's been more like a pothole: between last summer and this one, global sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter.
So what's up with the down seas, and what does it mean? Climate scientist Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., says you can blame it on the cycle of El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific.
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East Africa's climate under the spell of El Niño since the last Ice Age

The waxing and waning of rainfall in eastern tropical Africa in unison with ENSO is nothing unusual and existed already 20,000 years ago, according to a study published in the August 5 issue of Science by a group of scientists from Germany, Switzerland, the US, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
Clues to this imprint come from Lake Challa, a crater lake in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The mud at the lake's bottom shows yearly sedimentation layers, which consist of pairs of light- and dark-coloured striations and range between 0.08 and 7 mm in thickness. Comparison of thickness-variations of these sediment layers with instrumental records of tropical Pacific temperatures over the last 150 years shows that they reflect ENSO behaviour.
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Title: Reduced Interannual Rainfall Variability in East Africa During the Last Ice Age
Authors: Christian Wolff, Gerald H. Haug, Axel Timmermann,Jaap S. Sinninghe Damsté, Achim Brauer, Daniel M. Sigman, Mark A. Cane, Dirk Verschuren

Blobrana · L

Ancient El Niño clue to future floods

Dramatic climate swings behind both last year's Pakistan flooding and this year's Queensland floods in Australia are likely to continue as the world gets warmer, scientists predict.
Researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds have discovered that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the sloshing of the warmest waters on the planet from the West Pacific towards the East Pacific every 2-7 years, continued during the Earth's last great warm period, the Pliocene.
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Tree Rings Tell 1,100-Year History Of El Niño

El Niño and its partner La Niña, the warm and cold phases in the eastern half of the tropical Pacific, play havoc with climate worldwide. Predicting El Niño events more than several months ahead is now routine, but predicting how it will change in a warming world has been hampered by the short instrumental record.
An international team of climate scientists has now shown that annually resolved tree-ring records from North America, particularly from the US Southwest, give a continuous representation of the intensity of El Niño events over the past 1100 years and can be used to improve El Niño prediction in climate models. The study, spearheaded by Jinbao Li, International Pacific Research Centre, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, is published in the May 6 issue of Nature Climate Change.
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RE: El Niños