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Occurrence and trends of eastern and central Pacific El Niño in different reconstructed SST data sets
Author(s) -
Diamond Michael S.,
Bennartz Ralf
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2015gl066469
Subject(s) - sea surface temperature , climatology , data set , precipitation , geology , period (music) , oceanography , geography , meteorology , mathematics , statistics , physics , acoustics
Interest in El Niño diversity has increased in the past decade, with much attention given to the hypothesis that there exist distinct eastern Pacific and central Pacific (CP) types. It is well known that classification systems in the literature differ, sometimes dramatically, by methodology. We test to what extent differences may occur due to the use of different sea surface temperature (SST) reconstructions, focusing on the newly released version 4 of the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) data set, two earlier versions of the ERSST data set, and an independent data set, Hadley Centre Global Sea Ice and Sea Surface Temperature (HadISST). The updated ERSST data set identifies more CP El Niños than the two older versions of ERSST and HadISST. Classification differences occur throughout the entire record rather than being restricted to the early period. We explore the potential influence of SST data set choice on the study of El Niño diversity impacts using precipitation anomalies in the western United States.