A Simple Multiscale Intermediate Coupled Stochastic Model for El Niño
Diversity and Complexity
Abstract
El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most prominent interannual
climate variability in the tropics and exhibits diverse features in
spatiotemporal patterns. This paper develops a simple multiscale
intermediate coupled stochastic model to capture the ENSO diversity and
complexity. The model starts with a deterministic and linear coupled
interannual atmosphere, ocean, and sea surface temperature (SST) system.
It can generate two dominant linear solutions representing the eastern
Pacific (EP) and the central Pacific (CP) El Niños, respectively. In
addition to adopting a stochastic model for characterizing the
intraseasonal wind bursts, another simple stochastic process is
developed to describe the decadal variation of the background Walker
circulation. The latter links the two dominant modes in a simple
nonlinear fashion and advances the modulation of the strength and
occurrence frequency of the EP and the CP events. Finally, cubic
nonlinear damping is adopted to parameterize the relationship between
subsurface temperatures and thermocline depth. The model succeeds in
reproducing the spatiotemporal dynamical evolution of different types of
ENSO events. It also accurately recovers the strongly non-Gaussian
probability density function, the seasonal phase locking, the power
spectrum, and the temporal autocorrelation function of the SST anomalies
in all the three Niño regions (3, 3.4 and 4) across the equatorial
Pacific. Furthermore, both the composites of the SST anomalies for
various ENSO events and the strength-location bivariate distribution of
equatorial Pacific SST maxima for the El Niño events from the model
simulation highly resemble those from the observations.