is a skillful ENSO predictor on 7 month lead times, afterwards Indian and south Atlantic sea surface temperature anomalies are inferred to have become important. Optimal ENSO growth over 15 months also contains a significant extra-Pacific contribution, and it is possible to skillfully hindcast some (but not all) ENSO events in both periods over 15 month lead times. Of the four considered linear...

The success of an ENSO-based statistical rainfall prediction scheme and the in#uence of ENSO on Australia are shown to vary in association with a coherent, inter-decadal oscillation in surface temperature over the Paci"c Ocean. When this Inter-decadal Paci"c Oscillation (IPO) raises temperatures in the tropical Paci"c Ocean, there is no robust relationship between year-to-year Australian climat...

In many regions the strength of El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO) teleconnections has varied over the last century. It is an active area of research to investigate how such changes can be related to long-term climate variability or climate change. However, fluctuations due to the limited observational record and the low signal/noise ratio also contribute to variations in the apparent strength...

Strong El Niño events are followed by massive summer monsoon flooding over the Yangtze River basin (YRB), home to about a third of the population in China. Although the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) provides the main source of seasonal climate predictability for many parts of the Earth, the mechanisms of its connection to the East Asian monsoon remain largely elusive. For instance, the tr...

High resolution pollen analysis of mid- to late-Holocene peat deposits from southwest Florida reveals a stepwise increase in wetland vegetation that points to an increased precipitation-driven fresh water flow during the past 5,000 years. The tight coupling between winter precipitation patterns in Florida and the strength of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) strongly suggests that the pal...

Analysis of the 140-year historical record suggests that the inverse relationship between the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian summer monsoon (weak monsoon arising from warm ENSO event) has broken down in recent decades. Two possible reasons emerge from the analyses. A southeastward shift in the Walker circulation anomalies associated with ENSO events may lead to a reduced sub...

Linear equatorial wave theory (Matsuno, 1966) has shown that equatorially trapped waves (particularly Rossby and Kelvin waves) are important waves in determining large scale climatic processes such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO; e.g. Philander, 1990; Clarke, 2008). Other factors that determine properties like ENSO periodicity and strength are stochastic processes (Kleeman, 2008). Th...

The anomalous warming (cooling) of the surface waters of the tropical Pacific known as El Niño (La Niña) phenomena, with the atmospheric response called Southern Oscillation (ENSO), induces a prominent signal in the inter-annual climate variability in different regions of planet. Therefore, a great attention is paid to the understanding of the processes involved in the genesis and development o...

The paper "ENSO surface shortwave radiation forcing over the tropical Pacific" by Pavlakis et al adds the shortwave component to their earlier study, published in this journal, which examined ENSO surface longwave radiation forcing. The paper is fine, but the results basically corroborate previously published work regarding the evolution of ENSO induced changes in atmospheric circulation, outgo...

Oxygen isotope ratios in Porites microatolls from Christmas Island in the central Pacific provide highresolution proxy records of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability since 3.8 thousand years ago (ka). Compared with modern microatolls, reconstructions from fossil microatolls imply that interannual variations in ENSO sea-surface temperature and precipitation were less intense 3.8–2.8 ...