Abstract
Compared with well documented and frequent occurrence of multi-year La Niña, double-year El Niño is less frequent and has not been well investigated. Both of them are a discrepancy from the cyclic behavior of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and deserve investigation. Here, we demonstrate the diversity of single- and double-year El Niño events in their strengths, flavors, as well as associations with the recharge/discharge processes. The possible different climate impacts are also discussed. During 1950–2021, 75% of El Niño events persist for one year, and 25% of them last for two years. Both central and eastern Pacific type El Niños occur in the single-year and double-year El Niños with various strengths. On average, there is no relationship between the initial time and duration of an El Niño event. Compared with the single-year El Niños, the averaged warm water volume (WWV) is larger in the peak and declines slower for the double-year El Niños, suggesting that a persistently recharged heat condition of the equatorial Pacific is a precondition for the emergence of a second-year El Niño. The faster decline of WWV in the single-year El Niños is associated with the in-phase decrease of its intraseasonal-interseasonal and interannual components, while the slower decline of WWV in the double-year El Niños is determined by the interannual component. In addition, the single-year and double-year El Niño may have different impacts on regional climate.
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Data Availability
The analysis and reanalysis data used in this work are available through Kalnay et al. (1996), Chen et al. (2002), Rayner et al. (2003), Balmaseda et al. (2013), Behringer (2007), Li et al. (2022b), and also online: NCEP/NCAR reanalysis from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html, precipitation from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.precl.html, HadISST from http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadisst/data/download.html, ORAs4 D20 from https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/oras4-ecmwf-ocean-reanalysis-and-derived-ocean-heat-content, and GODAS D20 from https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.godas.html, respectively, or contact us via ztgtq@sina.com.
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Acknowledgements
The authors appreciate the constructive comments and insightful suggestions from reviewers, which help us to improve this work significantly. The authors declare no financial conflict of interest. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41630424, 41875119, 41930967, and 41661144007).
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Gao, Z., Hu, ZZ., Zheng, F. et al. Single-year and double-year El Niños. Clim Dyn 60, 2235–2243 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06425-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06425-8