Pantropical climate interactions

Abstract

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which originates in the Pacific, is the strongestand most well-known mode of tropical climate variability. Its reach is global, and it canforce climate variations of the tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceans by perturbing the globalatmospheric circulation. Less appreciated is how the tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceansaffect the Pacific. Especially noteworthy is the multidecadal Atlantic warming that began inthe late 1990s, because recent research suggests that it has influenced Indo-Pacificclimate, the character of the ENSO cycle, and the hiatus in global surface warming.Discovery of these pantropical interactions provides a pathway forward for improvingpredictions of climate variability in the current climate and for refining projections offuture climate under different anthropogenic forcing scenarios.