El Niño Chaos: Overlapping of Resonances Between the Seasonal Cycle and the Pacific Ocean-Atmosphere Oscillator
- 1 April 1994
- journal article
- other
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 264 (5155) , 72-74
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.264.5155.72
Abstract
The El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle is modeled as a low-order chaotic process driven by the seasonal cycle. A simple model suggests that the equatorial Pacific ocean-atmosphere oscillator can go into nonlinear resonance with the seasonal cycle and that with strong enough coupling between the ocean and the atmosphere, the system may become chaotic as a result of irregular jumping of the ocean-atmosphere system among different nonlinear resonances. An analysis of a time series from an ENSO prediction model is consistent with the low-order chaos mechanism.Keywords
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