Future Changes to El Niño–Southern Oscillation Temperature and Precipitation Teleconnections

Abstract

Potential changes to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) resulting from climate change may have far reaching impacts through atmospheric teleconnections. Here ENSO temperature and precipitation teleconnections between the historical and high-emission future simulations are compared in 40 models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Focusing on the global land area only, we show that there are robust increases in the spatial extent of ENSO teleconnections during austral summer in 2040–2089 of ~19% for temperature and ~12% for precipitation in the multimodel mean (MMM), relative to the 1950–1999 period. The MMM further shows that the expansion of ENSO teleconnection extent is at least partly related to a strengthening of ENSO teleconnections over continental regions; however, a consistent strengthening is not found across the individual models. This suggests that while more land may be affected by ENSO, the existing teleconnections may not be simply strengthened.