Assessing the future influence of the North Pacific trade wind precursors on ENSO in the CMIP6 HighResMIP multimodel ensemble

Abstract The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as one of the largest coupled climate modes, influences the livelihoods of millions of people and ecosystems survival. Thus, how ENSO is expected to behave under the influence of anthropogenic climate change is a substantial question to investigate. In this paper, we analyze future predictions of specific traits of ENSO, in combination with a subset of well-established precursors—the Trade Wind Charging and North Pacific Meridional Mode (TWC/NPMM). We study it across three sets of experiments from a protocol-driven ensemble from CMIP6—the High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP). Namely, (1) experiments at constant 1950’s radiative forcings, and (2) experiments of present (1950–2014) and (3) future (2015–2050) climate with prescribed increasing radiative forcings. We first investigate the current and predicted spatial characteristics of ENSO events, by calculating area, amplitude and longitude of the Center of Heat Index (CHI). We see that TWC/NPMM-charged events are consistently stronger, in both the presence and absence of external forcings; however, as anthropogenic forcings increase, the area of all ENSO events increases. Since the TWC/NPMM-ENSO relationship has been shown to affect the oscillatory behavior of ENSO, we analyze ENSO frequency by calculating CHI-analogous indicators on the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) of its signal. With this new methodology, we show that across the ensemble, ENSO oscillates at different frequencies, and its oscillatory behavior shows different degrees of stochasticity, over time and across models. However, we see no consistent indication of future trends in the oscillatory behavior of ENSO and the TWC/NPMM-ENSO relationship.