The Teleconnection of El Niño Southern Oscillation to the Stratosphere

Daniela I.V. Domeisen*, Chaim I. Garfinkel, Amy H. Butler

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

211 Scopus citations

Abstract

El Niño and La Niña events in the tropical Pacific have significant and disrupting impacts on the global atmospheric and oceanic circulation. El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impacts also extend above the troposphere, affecting the strength and variability of the stratospheric polar vortex in the high latitudes of both hemispheres, as well as the composition and circulation of the tropical stratosphere. El Niño events are associated with a warming and weakening of the polar vortex in the polar stratosphere of both hemispheres, while a cooling can be observed in the tropical lower stratosphere. These impacts are linked by a strengthened Brewer-Dobson circulation. Anomalous upward wave propagation is observed in the extratropics of both hemispheres. For La Niña, these anomalies are often opposite. The stratosphere in turn affects surface weather and climate over large areas of the globe. Since these surface impacts are long-lived, the changes in the stratosphere can lead to improved surface predictions on time scales of weeks to months. Over the past decade, our understanding of the mechanisms through which ENSO can drive impacts remote from the tropical Pacific has improved. This study reviews the possible mechanisms connecting ENSO to the stratosphere in the tropics and the extratropics of both hemispheres while also considering open questions, including nonlinearities in the teleconnections, the role of ENSO diversity, and the impacts of climate change and variability.

Original languageAmerican English
Pages (from-to)5-47
Number of pages43
JournalReviews of Geophysics
Volume57
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
D. D. is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through grant PP00P2_170523. C. I. G. is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant 1558/14) and by a European Research Council starting grant under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 677756). MSU/AMSU data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems, and data are available at www.remss.com/missions/amsu. Arctic Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation data from the Climate Prediction Center have been obtained from ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/cwlinks/. The ONI has been obtained from http://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php. The OI SST data set has been obtained from https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded-/data.noaa.oisst.v2.html. The CTI index has been obtained from http://research.jisao.-washington.edu/enso/. We use reanalysis obtained at the Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory; these include the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55) project carried out by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA-Interim Project (https://doi.org/10.5065/D6CR5RD9). We also use the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) from https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/MERRA-2/. Any additional data sets used are indicated in the references.

Funding Information:
D. D. is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through grant PP00P2_170523. C. I. G. is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant 1558/14) and by a European Research Council starting grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 677756). MSU/AMSU data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems, and data are available at www.remss.com/missions/amsu. Arctic Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation data from the Climate Prediction Center have been obtained from ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ cwlinks/. The ONI has been obtained from http://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ ONI_v5.php. The OI SST data set has been obtained from https://www.esrl. noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded-/data.noaa. oisst.v2.html. The CTI index has been obtained from http://research.jisao.- washington.edu/enso/. We use reanalysis obtained at the Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory; these include the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55) project carried out by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA-Interim Project (https://doi.org/10.5065/D6CR5RD9). We also use the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) from https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/ MERRA-2/. Any additional data sets used are indicated in the references.

Publisher Copyright:
©2018. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

  • El Nino Southern Oscillation
  • stratosphere
  • teleconnection

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