Dataset Information

Formation Mechanism for 2015/16 Super El Nino.

ABSTRACT: The extreme El Niño (EN) events in 1997/98 and 1982/83, referred to as super EN, exerted remarkable global influence. A super EN was anticipated on the way in early 2014 but failed to materialize toward the end of 2014. Whilst the scientific community was still puzzling about the cause of the aborted EN event in 2014, the remnants of the decaying warming in late 2014 unexpectedly reignited since February 2015 and grew into a super EN by the end of 2015. Understanding the onset mechanism of the 2015 EN event and its differences from past super EN events is crucial for improving EN prediction in a changing climate. Our observational analyses and modeling studies demonstrate that the principal difference between the 2015 EN and the past super ENs lies in exceptionally strong and consecutive occurrence of westerly wind burst events that turned around unfavorable ocean thermocline conditions in tropical western Pacific in early 2015, reigniting rapidly the surface warming in the eastern Pacific. By August the sea surface temperature anomalies reached a critical amplitude similar to that of the past super ENs; positive atmosphere-ocean feedbacks further amplify this warm episode into a super EN by the end of 2015.

SUBMITTER: Chen L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5462824 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Formation Mechanism for 2015/16 Super El Niño.

Chen Lin L Li Tim T Wang Bin B Wang Lu L

Scientific reports 20170607 1

The extreme El Niño (EN) events in 1997/98 and 1982/83, referred to as super EN, exerted remarkable global influence. A super EN was anticipated on the way in early 2014 but failed to materialize toward the end of 2014. Whilst the scientific community was still puzzling about the cause of the aborted EN event in 2014, the remnants of the decaying warming in late 2014 unexpectedly reignited since February 2015 and grew into a super EN by the end of 2015. Understanding the onset mechanism of the 2 ...[more]

PMID: 28592846

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Project description:Abundance, species diversity, and horizontal distributions of barnacle cyprids offshore of La Jolla, southern California were described from May 2014 to August 2016 to determine how the nearshore barnacle larval assemblage changed before, during, and after the 2015-16 El Niño. The entire water column was sampled at five stations located within one km of shore with water depths of 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 m during 33 cruises that encompassed the time when El Niño conditions impacted the area. Nearshore temperature and thermal stratification was concurrently measured using a CTD. Six identified cyprid species, including Chthamalus fissus, Pollicipes polymerus, Megabalanus rosa, Tetraclita rubescens, Balanus glandula, and B. trigonus, along with four unknown species, were collected in our samples. DNA barcoding was used to confirm identifications in a subset of the larvae. C. fissus was more than eight times more abundant than any other species, and while abundance varied by species, cyprid density was highest for all species except for M. rosa before and after the El Niño event, and lower during the environmental disturbance. There were significant differences in cross-shore distributions among cyprid species, with some located farther offshore than others, along with variability in cross-shore distributions by season. C. fissus cyprids were closest to shore during spring-summer cruises when waters were the most thermally stratified, which supports previous findings that C. fissus cyprids are constrained nearshore when thermal stratification is high. Relative species proportions varied throughout the study, but there was no obvious change in species assemblage or richness associated with El Niño. We speculate that barnacle cyprid species diversity did not increase at our study site during the 2015-16 El Niño, as it has in other areas during previous El Niño Southern Oscillation events, due to the lack of anomalous northward flow throughout the 2015-16 event.

Dataset Information

Formation Mechanism for 2015/16 Super El Nino.

Publications

Formation Mechanism for 2015/16 Super El Niño.

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