The Rise and Fall of ENSO in a Warming World: Insights from a Lag-Linear Model

Abstract

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a fluctuation in sea surface temperature and pressure across the equatorial Pacific Ocean with a period of 2-7 years. As the largest mode of interannual variability on Earth, ENSO shapes global weather and climate patterns ranging from monsoons in southern Asia to hurricanes in the Atlantic and droughts in South America. Predicting and understanding ENSO's response to greenhouse warming is essential for mitigating the impacts of climate change, yet model ensemble projections are expensive to generate across emission scenarios and remain incompletely understood. Here, we use a hierarchy of models to explain the transient rise and subsequent fall of ENSO strength under greenhouse warming, then develop an efficient and accurate method for predicting ENSO variability in any emissions scenario. Beginning with an East Pacific energy budget, we quantitatively show how enhanced upper-ocean stratification strengthens ENSO and how a slowing Walker circulation and stronger surface flux damping eventually weaken it. This leads to a linear model that predicts the evolution of ENSO variability from only East Pacific temperature and stratification. We further show that subsurface warming, and therefore stratification, is connected to surface warming with a lag, enabling us to create a lag-linear model that explains $\sim$90\% of simulated changes in ENSO variability from only global mean surface temperature and its history. Once calibrated, this efficient predictor can project ENSO strength without running a full climate model, and allows an analytic solution for the timing and magnitude of peak ENSO variability. We find that the ratio of an ocean subsurface adjustment timescale to the warming timescale strongly alters peak ENSO amplitude, meaning that faster emissions lead to larger ENSO variability even with identical total emissions.