Re: Climate Change News & Discussions
Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2022 6:09 pm
Eastern Pacific Warming to Change Surface Temperatures in Years, Not Decades
by Kendra Leon
November 15, 2022
Introduction:
by Kendra Leon
November 15, 2022
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/eastern ... -decades/(Courthouse News) — For some time, scientists believed 2070 was the earliest they would be able to detect a change in the Pacific Ocean’s surface temperature. A study published Tuesday in Nature Communications moves that projection up by four decades, to 2030.
Dr. Tao Geng of the CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere and Dr. Wenju Cai of the Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology focused their study on the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), what they called “the strongest and most consequential year-to-year climate fluctuation on the planet.” Every year with some variability in either the equatorial eastern Pacific (EP) or central Pacific (CP), ENSO creates worldwide natural events during its warm El Niño phase or cold La Niña phase.
Previous measurements of EP-ENSO and CP-ENSO had biases when it came to that variability, according to the study.
“Climate models suffer from persistent biases in their simulation of the mean equatorial climate and ENSO dynamics,” said the researchers in their study. Although some of their models continued to simulate a “too-cold climatological Pacific cold tongue,” they never fell before their 85% confidence level, and the researchers accounted for the underestimated EP-ENSO rainfall sensitivity. Combining this with 70 years of ENSO data starting from 1950 and some of the newest climate models, the researchers predict that environmental change will happen, including the Pacific Ocean's rising surface temperature, by 2030.
According to Geng, the rising surface temperature of the eastern Pacific will affect ENSO.