El Niño events — the warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, typically during the boreal cold season — have far-reaching impacts across the globe, strongly in the tropics and more subtly in the extratropics. Recently, U.S. scientists proposed a simple conceptual model of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and its links to other major modes of climate variability. Despite its simplicity, this data-driven approach rivaled complex state-of-the-art climate models in forecasting ENSO.
Subsequently, research at MATE focused on improving the estimation of the model’s parameters. This led to a breakthrough forecast model that delivers the most accurate ENSO predictions to date. Web application link.
