Journal Article

Highly Variable El Niño—Southern Oscillation Throughout the Holocene

Charles, Christopher D., Edwards, R. L., Cobb, Kim M., Watson, Jordan T., Sayani, Hussein R., Di Lorenzo, Emanuele, Westphal, Niko, Cheng, H.

2013

Overview

The El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives large changes in global climate patterns from year to year, yet its sensitivity to continued anthropogenic greenhouse forcing is uncertain. We analyzed fossil coral reconstructions of ENSO spanning the past 7000 years from the Northern Line Islands, located in the center of action for ENSO. The corals document highly variable ENSO activity, with no evidence for a systematic trend in ENSO variance, which is contrary to some models that exhibit a response to insolation forcing over this same period. Twentieth-century ENSO variance is significantly higher than average fossil coral ENSO variance but is not unprecedented. Our results suggest that forced changes in ENSO, whether natural or anthropogenic, may be difficult to detect against a background of large internal variability.

• Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science,The American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Subject: air temperature / Animals / Anthozoa - growth & development / Anthropogenic factors / Atmospheric temperature / Christmas / climate / Climate Change / Climate models / Data lines / Earth sciences / Earth, ocean, space / El Nino / Equatorial regions / Exact sciences and technology / Fossils / Global climate / Global temperatures / Global warming / Graph theory / Greenhouse effect / greenhouse gas emissions / Greenhouse gases / Holocene / Insolation / Islands / Marine and continental quaternary / Meteorology / Musical intervals / Pacific Ocean / Paleoclimate science / rain / solar radiation / Southern Oscillation / Statistical variance / Surficial geology / Time series / Time series models