A re-appraisal of the ENSO response to volcanism with paleoclimate data assimilation

Feng Zhu; Julien Emile-Geay; Kevin J Anchukaitis; Gregory J Hakim; Andrew T Wittenberg; Mariano S Morales; Matthew Toohey; Jonathan King

doi:10.1038/s41467-022-28210-1

A re-appraisal of the ENSO response to volcanism with paleoclimate data assimilation

Nat Commun. 2022 Feb 8;13(1):747. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-28210-1.

Authors

Feng Zhu^{1

2}, Julien Emile-Geay³, Kevin J Anchukaitis^{4

5

6}, Gregory J Hakim⁷, Andrew T Wittenberg⁸, Mariano S Morales^{9

10}, Matthew Toohey¹¹, Jonathan King^{4

6}

Affiliations

¹ School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China.
² Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
³ Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. julieneg@usc.edu.
⁴ Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
⁵ School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
⁶ Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
⁷ Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
⁸ NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, USA.
⁹ Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología y Cs. Ambientales, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Mendoza, Argentina.
¹⁰ Laboratorio de Dendrocronología, Universidad Continental, Huancayo, Peru.
¹¹ Institute of Space and Atmospheric Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.

Abstract

The potential for explosive volcanism to affect the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has been debated since the 1980s. Several observational studies, based largely on tree-ring proxies, have since found support for a positive ENSO phase in the year following large eruptions. In contrast, recent coral data from the heart of the tropical Pacific suggest no uniform ENSO response to explosive volcanism over the last millennium. Here we leverage paleoclimate data assimilation to integrate both tree-ring and coral proxies into a reconstruction of ENSO state, and re-appraise this relationship. We find only a weak statistical association between volcanism and ENSO, and identify the selection of volcanic events as a key variable to the conclusion. We discuss the difficulties of conclusively establishing a volcanic influence on ENSO by empirical means, given the myriad factors affecting the response, including the spatiotemporal details of the forcing and ENSO phase preconditioning.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't