Malte Stuecker

NP Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

The 2016 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Malte Stuecker for the poster/PICO entitled:

El Niño−Southern Oscillation frequency cascade (Stuecker, M.F.; Jin, F.-F.; Timmermann, A.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

I recently received my PhD from the Atmospheric Sciences department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The material presented at the session is from my final dissertation chapter.

I demonstrated that nonlinear interactions between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Western Pacific warm pool annual cycle create deterministic climate variability on a wide range of new timescales via a frequency cascade mechanism. ENSO-associated sea surface temperature (SST) variability is dominated by interannual timescales. In contrast, it is shown that ENSO impacts (such as wind and rainfall variability) in the East Asian Monsoon region are dominated by higher frequency variability on sub-annual to near-annual timescales (ENSO combination tones). Thus, a large fraction of the atmospheric background spectrum during ENSO-active periods is deterministic on timescales down to several months. The presented framework can for instance be utilized for seasonal predictions of the East Asian Monsoon system.