El Niño: A Chaotic Dynamical System?

Most of the principal qualitative features of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon can be explained by a simple but physically motivated theory. These features are the occurrence of sea-surface warmings in the eastern equatorial Pacific and the associated trade wind reversal; the aperiodicity of these events; the preferred onset time with respect to the seasonal cycle; and the much weaker events in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The theory, in its simplest form, is a conceptual model for the interaction of just three variables, namely near-surface temperatures in the east and west equatorial ocean and a wind-driven current advecting the temperature field. For a large range of parameters, the model is naturally chaotic and aperiodically produces El Niño-like events. For a smaller basin, representing a smaller ocean, the events are proportionally less intense.