The cycling between warm El Niño and cold La Niña conditions in the eastern Pacific (commonly referred to as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, ENSO) has persisted without major interruptions for at least the last 11,000 years. This may change in the future according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea, the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.
The team conducted a series of global climate model simulations with an unprecedented spatial resolution of 10 km in the ocean and 25 km in the atmosphere. Boosted by the power of one of South Korea’s fastest supercomputers (Aleph), the new ultra-high-resolution climate model simulations can now realistically simulate tropical cyclones in the atmosphere and tropical instability waves in the equatorial Pacific Ocean (see Fig.1), which both play fundamental roles in the generation and termination of El Niño and La Niña events. “Our supercomputer ran non-stop for over one year to complete a series of century-long simulations covering present-day climate and two different global warming levels. The model generated 2 quadrillion bytes of data; enough to fill up about 2,000 hard disks”, says Dr. Sun-Seon Lee who conducted the experiments.
Read more at: Institute for Basic Science
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