El Niño and its partner La Niña, the warm and cold phases in the
eastern half of the tropical Pacific, play havoc with climate
worldwide. Predicting El Niño events more than several months
ahead is now routine, but predicting how it will change in a
warming world has been hampered by the short instrumental
record. An international team of climate scientists has now
shown that annually resolved tree-ring records from North
America, particularly from the US Southwest, give a continuous
representation of the intensity of El Niño events over the past
1100 years and can be used to improve El Niño prediction in
climate models. The study, spearheaded by Jinbao Li,
International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawai'i at
Manoa, is published in the May 6 issue of Nature Climate Change.
Tree rings in the US Southwest, the team found, agree well with
the 150-year instrumental sea surface temperature records in the
tropical Pacific. During El Niño, the unusually warm surface
temperatures in the eastern Pacific lea