Abstract
Previous reconstructions suggest a possible correlation between solar and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the centennial‒millennial time scales, but the mechanism remains controversial. This study conducts Holocene transient simulations and finds a significant 350‒500-year cycle of ENSO-like variability during the mid‒late Holocene under solar activity forcing, supported by multiple reconstructions. This multi-centennial ENSO-like variability is caused by the solar-forced low-latitude process, not the high-latitude process or internal variability. When solar radiation increases, the subtropical Asian continent-Indian Ocean thermal contrast is enhanced, increasing precipitation over the India and Bay of Bengal, which generates easterly anomaly over the Indo-Pacific warm pool. Increased solar radiation also enhances the evaporation in the cloud-free regions of western North and South Pacific, and the moisture is transported to the Maritime Continent by easterly. This increases precipitation there and strengthens the easterly anomaly over the equatorial western Pacific, which triggers the La Niña-like state. The leading coupling process for the development of La Niña-like state is zonal advective and upwelling feedback, and poleward heat advection further amplifies the equatorial eastern Pacific cooling. Findings from this study suggests that a centennial-scale El Niño-like condition might occur under solar forcings if the forecast predicts a solar minimum at the end of the 21st century.
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Data availability
The outputs of NNU-Holocene long-term simulation are too large to be publicly archived with available resources. They are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The TraCE-21 ka simulations are archived at https://www.earthsystemgrid.org. The proxy data are all derived from the previous published work, which can be downloaded at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/paleoclimatology/climate-reconstruction (with a name search).
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Acknowledgements
We thank the TraCE-21 ka and CESM-LME for providing the modeling data, and thank the researchers who provided the proxies in Table 1. Our study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (42130604) National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFF0804704), NSFC (42105044, 42075049, and 42205055), and Swedish STINT (CH2019-8377), and Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (164320H116).
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Sun, W., Ma, Y., Liu, J. et al. Multi-centennial ENSO-like variability response to solar activity during the holocene. Clim Dyn (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-024-07198-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-024-07198-y