The main objective of this article is to establish a new mechanism of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as a self-organizing and self-excitation system, with two highly coupled processes. The first is the oscillation between the two metastable warm (El Niño phase) and cold events (La Niña phase), and the second is the spatiotemporal oscillation of the sea surface temperature (SST) field....

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle of alternating warm El Niño and cold La Niña events is the dominant year-to-year climate signal on Earth. ENSO originates in the tropical Pacific through interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere, but its environmental and socioeconomic impacts are felt worldwide. Spurred on by the powerful 1997-1998 El Niño, efforts to understand the causes...

The limits for the predictability of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have been long discussed. Even when ENSO prediction skill is expected to be limited, questions remain as to which are the controlling factors. The role of atmospheric noise for ENSO initiation, the growth of initial errors and inadequate models have been identified as key elements (e.g., Chen et al. 2004; Chen and Cane...

Evidence suggests that the magnitude and frequency of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) changes on interdecadal time scales. This is manifest in a distinct shift in ENSO behavior during the late 1970s. This study investigates mechanisms that may force this interdecadal variability and, in particular, on modulations driven by extratropical Rossby waves. Results from oceanic shallow-water m...

E l Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a naturally occurring phenomenon in the tropical Pacific that has global impacts of great relevance to society. The term El Niño refers to warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean occurring every 2–7 yr, while the opposite cold phase is known as La Niña. Anomalous warming or cooling conditions are associated with a large-scale east–west sea level pressure se...

[1] Continuous monthly mass balance measurements from the ablation zone of Antizana 15 glacier in the Andes of Ecuador between January 1995 and December 2002 indicate a strong dependence on El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Over the 8-year period investigated, mass balance was negative all year round during El Niño periods but remained close to equilibrium (positive anomalies) during La Niña...

A nonlinear projection of the tropical Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA) onto the Northern Hemisphere winter sea level pressure (SLP) anomalies by neural networks (NN) was performed to investigate the nonlinear association between ENSO and the Euro-Atlantic winter climate. While the linear impact of ENSO on the Euro-Atlantic winter SLP is weak, the NN projection reveals statistic...

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the variability in the Pacific subtropical highs (PSHs) have major impacts on social and ecological systems. Here we present an Atlantic capacitor effect mechanism to suggest that the Atlantic is a key pacemaker of the biennial variability in the Pacific including that in ENSO and the PSHs during recent decades. The 'charging' (that is, ENSO imprintin...

We study the dependence of the simulated ENSO on the mean simulated climate in the HadCM3 GCM and attempt to understand its relation with results from intermediate-complexity models (ICMs). Our aim is to bridge an existing gap between results from complex GCMs and from more readily understandable ICMs, and thereby to improve our process-based prediction skills of the potential sensitivity of ob...