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El Niño southern oscillation as sporadic oscillations between metastable states

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Abstract

The main objective of this article is to establish a new mechanism of ENSO, as a self-organizing and selfexcitation system, with two highly coupled processes. The first is the oscillation between the two metastable warm (El Niño phase) and cold events (La Niña phase), and the second is the spatiotemporal oscillation of the sea surface temperature (SST) field. The symbiotic interplay between these two processes gives rises the climate variability associated with the ENSO, leads to both the random and deterministic features of the ENSO, and defines a new natural feedback mechanism, which drives the sporadic oscillation of the ENSO. The new mechanism is rigorously derived using a dynamic transition theory developed recently by the authors, which has also been successfully applied to a wide range of problems in nonlinear sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Tian Ma  (马 天)

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Shouhong Wang

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  1. Tian Ma  (马 天)
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  2. Shouhong Wang
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Correspondence to Shouhong Wang.

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Ma, T., Wang, S. El Niño southern oscillation as sporadic oscillations between metastable states. Adv. Atmos. Sci. 28, 612–622 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-010-9089-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-010-9089-0

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