A New Picture of the Global Impacts of El Nino-Southern Oscillation

The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant interannual variability of Earth’s climate system and plays a central role in global climate prediction. Outlooks of ENSO and its impacts often follow a two-tier approach: predicting ENSO sea surface temperature anomaly in tropical Pacific and then predicting its global impacts. However, the current picture of ENSO global impacts widely used by forecasting centers and atmospheric science textbooks came from two earliest surface station datasets complied 30 years ago, and focused on the extreme phases rather than the whole ENSO lifecycle. Here, we demonstrate a new picture of the global impacts of ENSO throughout its whole lifecycle based on the rich latest satellite, in situ and reanalysis datasets. ENSO impacts are much wider than previously thought. There are significant impacts unknown in the previous picture over Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The so-called “neutral years” are not neutral, but are associated with strong sea surface temperature anomalies in global oceans outside the tropical Pacific, and significant anomalies of land surface air temperature and precipitation over all the continents.