Big El Niños Ride the Back of Slower Climate Change
- 19 February 1999
- journal article
- other
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 283 (5405) , 1108-1109
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.283.5405.1108
Abstract
Climate modelers successfully anticipated the arrival of the 1997 El Niño, but they were blind-sided by its intensity. Now, by deconstructing the symphony of longer-term climatic cycles that play out in the Pacific Ocean, researchers have found clues to why this event and the powerful El Niño of 1982-83 were so severe. Other, slower cycles of ocean warming and cooling have tended to be at or near their peaks--in some cases unusually high peaks--since the 1970s. By preheating the Pacific, they boosted the intensity of the El Niños.This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: