Mixed mode oscillations of the El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation
Dynamical Systems
2016-05-04 v3
Abstract
Very strong El Ni\~no events occur sporadically every 10-20 years. The origin of this bursting behavior still remains elusive. Using a simplified 3-dimensional dynamical model of the tropical Pacific climate system, which captures the El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) combined with recently developed mathematical tools for fast-slow systems we show that decadal ENSO bursting behavior can be explained as a Mixed Mode Oscillation (MMO), which also predicts a critical threshold for rapid amplitude growth. It is hypothesized that the MMO dynamics of the low-dimensional climate model can be linked to a saddle-focus equilibrium point, which mimics a tropical Pacific Ocean state without ocean circulation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1511.07472,
title = {Mixed mode oscillations of the El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation},
author = {Andrew Roberts and Esther Widiasih and Axel Timmermann and Christopher K. R. T. Jones and John Guckenheimer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07472},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
18 pages, 7 figures