How El Niño impacts global temperatures »
Scientists have found past El Niño oscillations in the Pacific Ocean may have amplified global climate fluctuations for hundreds of years at a time. The team uncovered century-scale patterns in Pacific rainfall and temperature, and linked them with global climate changes in the past 2000 years. For example, northern hemisphere warming and droughts between the years 950 and 1250 corresponded to an El Niño-like state in the Pacific, which switched to a La Niña-like pattern during a cold period between 1350 and 1900. The new data will help scientists build more accurate models of future climate, said member of the research team, Alena Kimbrough, a PhD student at the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences. "Our work is a significant piece in the grand puzzle. The tropics are a complicated, yet incredibly important region to global climate and it's been great to untangle what's happening," said Ms Kimbrough. "The current models struggle to reflect century-scale changes in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
