Pacific Coastal Niños - the role of Equatorial Heat Content and relation to SST phase propagation (PaCoNi)

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Joke Lübbecke
• Subject Area: Oceanography
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464487142

In austral fall 2017, a strong warming off the Peruvian coast in the southeastern tropical Pacific caused extreme rainfall and flooding in Peru and Ecuador and severely impacted the Peruvian ecosystem and society. This project aims at better understanding such coastal Niño events that are not linked to basin-scale anomalies in the tropical Pacific. Recent work of the PI suggests that whether the equatorial Pacific is in a recharged or discharged state plays a crucial role for the connection between the coastal and central equatorial SST anomalies. This hypothesis will be tested in this study with targeted climate model experiments. The project will quantitatively assess the importance of the equatorial Pacific heat content for the spreading of coastal sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies into the equatorial Pacific, thereby also providing new information on the widely discussed multi-decadal variations in the propagation direction of El Niño-related SST anomalies with potential implications for El Niño predictions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants