In a paper published today in Nature Geoscience, researchers from Japan and France said they have developed a new forecast model that can predict an El Niño event 14 months ahead of time, several months earlier than with current methods.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an inter-annual climate phenomenon that consists of irregular episodes of warm El Niño, and cold La Niña, conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The pattern is well-known for the havoc it creates in terms of droughts, floods or other severe weather but until now it has been difficult to predict more than a few months ahead.

Like the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean also has climate fluctuations, and Takeshi Izumo, of the Research Institute for Global Change in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues, found that the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), the Indian Ocean equivalent of an El Niño, played a role in causing the Pacific phenomenon.

“IOD strongly influences the triggering of El Niño (the following year). In this study, we did a simple forecast model, we included the IOD index and we can have a very good forecast for the El Niño in the next year,” Izumo said.

The authors believe that a better understanding of the inter-annual variability of the Indian Ocean will benefit ENSO forecasters and will help mitigate the destruction caused by the phenomenon. “Because of the overwhelming consequences of El Niño… and its strong global socio-economic and ecological consequences, El Niño forecasting is important for disaster prevention and impact management, and helps to reduce El Niño-related losses,” Izumo said. [Reuters]

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El Niño, El Niño prediction, ENSO, Indian Ocean, Indian Ocean Dipole, IOD, La Niña, Pacific Ocean