Abstract:The ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) is the dominant inter-annual climate signal on Earth, and its relationships with marine environments constitute a complex interrelated system. As traditional methods face great challenges in analyzing which, how and where marine parameters change when ENSO events occur, we propose an ENSO-oriented marine spatial association pattern (EOMSAP) mining algorithm for dealing with multiple long-term raster-formatted datasets. EOMSAP consists of four key steps. The first quantifies the abnormal variations of marine parameters into three levels using the mean-standard deviation criteria of time series; the second categorizes La Niña events, neutral conditions, or El Niño events using an ENSO index; then, the EOMSAP designs a linking-pruning-generating recursive loop to generate (m + 1)-candidate association patterns from an m-dimensional one by combining a user-specified support with a conditional support; and the fourth generates strong association patterns according to the userspecified evaluation indicators. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of EOMSAP, we present two case studies with real remote sensing datasets from January 1998 to December 2012: one considers performance analysis relative to the ENSO-Apriori and Apriori methods; and the other identifies marine spatial association patterns within the Pacific Ocean.