How Significant Was the 1877/78 El Niño?

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the 1877/78 El Niño resulted in great famine events around the world. However, the strength and statistical significance of this El Niño event have not been fully addressed, largely due to the lack of data. We take a closer look at the data using an ensemble analysis of the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature version 5 (ERSSTv5). The ERSSTv5 standard run indicates a strong El Niño event with a peak monthly value of the Niño-3 index of 3.5°C during 1877/78, stronger than those during 1982/83, 1997/98, and 2015/16. However, an analysis of the ERSSTv5 ensemble runs indicates that the strength and significance (uncertainty estimates) depend on the construction of the ensembles. A 1000-member ensemble analysis shows that the ensemble mean Niño-3 index has a much weaker peak of 1.8°C, and its uncertainty is much larger during 1877/78 (2.8°C) than during 1982/83 (0.3°C), 1997/98 (0.2°C), and 2015/16 (0.1°C). Further, the large uncertainty during 1877/78 is associated with selections of a short (1 month) period of raw-data filter and a large (20%) acceptance criterion of empirical orthogonal teleconnection modes in the ERSSTv5 reconstruction. By adjusting these two parameters, the uncertainty during 1877/78 decreases to 0.5°C, while the peak monthly value of the Niño-3 index in the ensemble mean increases to 2.8°C, suggesting a strong and statistically significant 1877/78 El Niño event. The adjustment of those two parameters is validated by masking the modern observations of 1981–2017 to 1861–97. Based on the estimated uncertainties, the differences among the strength of these four major El Niño events are not statistically significant.

A Continuous Record of Central Tropical Pacific Climate Since the Midnineteenth Century Reconstructed From Fanning and Palmyra Island Corals: A Case Study in Coral Data Reanalysis

“…Through this conversion, we find that only the SODA 2.2.4 reanalysis (Giese & Ray, 2011) estimates the 1877–1878 El Niño event as a higher magnitude than the coral reconstruction. The SODA product estimates anomalies of 3.5°C in the Niño 3.4 region (Giese & Ray, 2011), falling within recent estimates of anomalies of 2.8–3.5°C and uncertainty (0.5°C) in the Niño 3 region (Huang et al, 2020), especially when considering the 1877–1878 event peak SST anomalies were amplified westward (Singh et al, 2018). In the F+Precon coral reconstruction, the 1877–1878 event is explicitly resolved by a Fanning coral δ 18 O record, while the Palmyra contribution to this event is derived from the RegEM extension.…”

A New Evaluation of the Role of Urbanization to Warming at Various Spatial Scales: Evidence From the Guangdong‐Hong Kong‐Macau Region, China

“…Following Karl et al (2015), the data uncertainty (by perturbing the time series by its the standard deviation) and fitting uncertainty are combined to assess the total uncertainty of the SAT trends for urbanization warming. The fitting uncertainty is quantified using effective sampling size determined by Lag‐1 autocorrelation of time series considered (B. Huang et al, 2020; Q. X. Li, Sun, et al, 2020).…”

Marine heatwaves in global sea surface temperature records since 1850

“…The importance of El Niño in driving the most extensive MHWs globally is highlighted by the coincidence of many of the strongest El Niño years with prominent peaks in A MHW . Particularly noteworthy are the exceptionally powerful El Niño events in 1877-78 [33] and 1997-98 [34]. These events are also clearly visible in the decadal maps of f MHW .…”