10 research outputs found
Pacific island regional preparedness for El Niño
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle is often blamed for disasters in Pacific island communities. From a disaster risk reduction (DRR) perspective, the challenges with the El Niño part of the ENSO cycle, in particular, are more related to inadequate vulnerability reduction within development than to ENSO-induced hazard influences. This paper analyses this situation, filling in a conceptual and geographic gap in El Niño-related research, by reviewing El Niño-related preparedness (the conceptual gap) for Pacific islands (the geographic gap). Through exploring El Niño impacts on Pacific island communities alongside their vulnerabilities, resiliences, and preparedness with respect to El Niño, El Niño is seen as a constructed discourse rather than as a damaging phenomenon, leading to suggestions for El Niño preparedness as DRR as part of development. Yet the attention which El Niño garners might bring resources to the Pacific region and its development needs, albeit in the short term while El Niño lasts. Conversely, the attention given to El Niño could shift blame from underlying causes of vulnerability to a hazard-centric viewpoint. Instead of focusing on one hazard-influencing phenomenon, opportunities should be created for the Pacific region to tackle wider DRR and development concerns
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Support for global climate reorganization during the "Medieval Climate Anomaly"
Widely distributed proxy records indicate that
the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; *900–1350 AD)
was characterized by coherent shifts in large-scale Northern
Hemisphere atmospheric circulation patterns. Although
cooler sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern
equatorial Pacific can explain some aspects of medieval
circulation changes, they are not sufficient to account for
other notable features, including widespread aridity
through the Eurasian sub-tropics, stronger winter westerlies
across the North Atlantic and Western Europe, and shifts in
monsoon rainfall patterns across Africa and South Asia.
We present results from a full-physics coupled climate
model showing that a slight warming of the tropical Indian
and western Pacific Oceans relative to the other tropical
ocean basins can induce a broad range of the medieval
circulation and climate changes indicated by proxy data,
including many of those not explained by a cooler tropical
Pacific alone. Important aspects of the results resemble
those from previous simulations examining the climatic
response to the rapid Indian Ocean warming during the late
twentieth century, and to results from climate warming
simulations—especially in indicating an expansion of the
Northern Hemisphere Hadley circulation. Notably, the
pattern of tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature
(SST) change responsible for producing the proxy-model
similarity in our results agrees well with MCA-LIA SST
differences obtained in a recent proxy-based climate field
reconstruction. Though much remains unclear, our results
indicate that the MCA was characterized by an enhanced
zonal Indo-Pacific SST gradient with resulting changes in
Northern Hemisphere tropical and extra-tropical circulation
patterns and hydroclimate regimes, linkages that may
explain the coherent regional climate shifts indicated by
proxy records from across the planet. The findings provide
new perspectives on the nature and possible causes of the
MCA—a remarkable, yet incompletely understood episode
of Late Holocene climatic change