TY - JOUR
T1 - How likely is an El Ni&no to break the global mean surface temperature record during the 21st century?
AU - Hsu, Chia Wei
AU - Yin, Jianjun
N1 - Funding Information:
This study is supported by the NOAA Climate Program Office (grant NA18OAR4310267).We thank Dr Stephen M Griffies and Dr John Krasting at NOAA/GFDL for the helpful comments on the manuscript. The authors thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their advice on improving this manuscript. We thank the CMIP group and modeling centers for providing the simulated data (tables S1 S3) and also the data hosting center at the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). The simulated data used in the study are available from the Earth System Grid (https://esgf.llnl.gov).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.
PY - 2019/9/13
Y1 - 2019/9/13
N2 - The likelihood of an El Ni&no breaking the annual global mean surface temperature (GMST) record during the 21st century is derived from 38 climate models from the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). We find that, under a low emission scenario, one out of three El Ni&no events break the GMST record. The probability significantly increases to four out of five in a high emission scenario. About half of strong El Ni&nos, but only one-fifth of weak El Ni&nos, can set new GMST records in a low emission scenario. By contrast, even weak El Ni&nos break the GMST record more regularly (68 8% chance) in a high emission scenario. Both a stronger El Ni&no and a higher emission scenario induce a higher record-breaking GMST with a magnitude range from 0.03 C to 0.21 C above the previous record. El Ni&no accounts for more than half of record-breaking GMST occurrences in all emission scenarios. A comparison between CMIP3, CMIP5, and CMIP6 suggests that the analyses are not affected by model generations.
AB - The likelihood of an El Ni&no breaking the annual global mean surface temperature (GMST) record during the 21st century is derived from 38 climate models from the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). We find that, under a low emission scenario, one out of three El Ni&no events break the GMST record. The probability significantly increases to four out of five in a high emission scenario. About half of strong El Ni&nos, but only one-fifth of weak El Ni&nos, can set new GMST records in a low emission scenario. By contrast, even weak El Ni&nos break the GMST record more regularly (68 8% chance) in a high emission scenario. Both a stronger El Ni&no and a higher emission scenario induce a higher record-breaking GMST with a magnitude range from 0.03 C to 0.21 C above the previous record. El Ni&no accounts for more than half of record-breaking GMST occurrences in all emission scenarios. A comparison between CMIP3, CMIP5, and CMIP6 suggests that the analyses are not affected by model generations.
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U2 - 10.1088/1748-9326/ab3b82
DO - 10.1088/1748-9326/ab3b82
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85081128922
VL - 14
JO - Environmental Research Letters
JF - Environmental Research Letters
SN - 1748-9326
IS - 9
M1 - 094017
ER -