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Science 1 April 1994:
Vol. 264. no. 5155, pp. 72 - 74
DOI: 10.1126/science.264.5155.72
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Articles

El Niño Chaos: Overlapping of Resonances Between the Seasonal Cycle and the Pacific Ocean-Atmosphere Oscillator

Eli Tziperman 1, Lewi Stone 1, Mark A. Cane 2, and Hans Jarosh 1

1 Environmental Sciences and Energy Research, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
2 Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA.

The El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle is modeled as a low-order chaotic process driven by the seasonal cycle. A simple model suggests that the equatorial Pacific ocean-atmosphere oscillator can go into nonlinear resonance with the seasonal cycle and that with strong enough coupling between the ocean and the atmosphere, the system may become chaotic as a result of irregular jumping of the ocean-atmosphere system among different nonlinear resonances. An analysis of a time series from an ENSO prediction model is consistent with the low-order chaos mechanism.

Submitted on July 1, 1993
Accepted on January 31, 1994


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