Bernat Jiménez-Esteve

CL Climate: Past, Present & Future

The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Bernat Jiménez-Esteve for the poster/PICO entitled:

Nonlinearity in the Northern Hemisphere atmospheric response to a linear ENSO forcing (Jiménez-Esteve, B.; Domeisen, D. I. V.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Bernat Jiménez-Esteve is a PhD student in the Atmospheric Predictability group at ETH Zurich, led by Prof. Dr. Daniela Domeisen. He pursued a Bachelor degree in Physics and a Master degree in Meteorology at the University of Barcelona. His PhD research focuses on the El Niño Southern Oscillation’s (ENSO) influence on extratropical climate. He uses observational and model data to understand the physical mechanisms that lead to such remote influences, which can improve predictability at seasonal timescales.
At EGU 2019, he presented results from atmospheric model simulations forced with sea surface temperatures (SSTs) following the seasonal evolution of warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) ENSO phases. Whereas for moderate events the surface impacts in the North Pacific are quite linear (El Niño and La Niña have similar but opposite impacts), strong events exhibit significant nonlinearity (strong ENSO events yield more than twice the impact, especially for El Niño). The nonlinearity can be traced back to the relationship between SST and tropical rainfall. These results may have important implications for projected changes in the ENSO characteristics with climate change.