(Press-News.org) Multiyear La Niña events have become more common over the last 100 years, according to a new study led by University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa atmospheric scientist Bin Wang. Five out of six La Niña events since 1998 have lasted more than one year, including an unprecedented triple-year event. The study was published this week in Nature Climate Change.
“The clustering of multiyear La Niña events is phenomenal given that only ten such events have occurred since 1920,” said Wang, emeritus professor of atmospheric sciences in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.
El Niño and La Niña, the warm and cool phases of a recurring climate pattern across the tropical Pacific, affect weather and ocean conditions, which can, in turn, influence the marine environment and fishing industry in Hawai‘i and throughout the Pacific Ocean. Long-lasting La Niñas could cause persistent climate extremes and devastating weather events, affecting community resilience, tourist industry and agriculture.
Determining why so many multiyear La Niña events have emerged recently and whether they will become more common has sparked worldwide discussion among climate scientists, yet answers remain elusive.
Wang and co-authors examined 20 La Niña events from 1920-2022 to investigate the fundamental reasons behind the historic change of the multiyear La Niña. Some long-lasting La Niñas occurred after a super El Niño, which the researchers expected due to the massive discharge of heat from the upper-ocean following an El Niño. However, three recent multiyear La Niña episodes (2007–08, 2010–11, and 2020–22) did not follow this pattern.
They discovered these events are fueled by warming in the western Pacific Ocean and steep gradients in sea surface temperature from the western to central Pacific.
“Warming in the western Pacific triggers the rapid onset and persistence of these events,” said Wang. “Additionally, our study revealed that multiyear La Niña are distinguished from single-year La Niña by a conspicuous onset rate, which foretells its accumulative intensity and climate impacts.”
Results from complex computer simulations of climate support the observed link between multiyear La Niña events and western Pacific warming.
The new findings shed light on the factors conducive to escalating extreme La Niña in a future warming world. More multiyear La Niña events will exacerbate adverse impacts on communities around the globe, if the western Pacific continues to warm relative to the central Pacific.
“Our perception moves beyond the current notion that links extreme El Niño and La Niña to the eastern Pacific warming and attributes the increasing extreme El Niño and La Niña to different sources,” Wang added. “The knowledge gained from our study offers emergent constraints to reduce the uncertainties in projecting future changes of extreme La Niña, which may help us better prepare for what lies ahead.”
END
Long-lasting La Niña events more common over past century
2023-09-21
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Traumatic brain injury under-recognized as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease
2023-09-21
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of long-term disability and premature death, especially among military personnel and those playing contact sports. Substantial research has examined acute and chronic neurological consequences of TBI; however, non-neurological conditions associated with TBI are understudied. A new review paper by investigators from Mass General Brigham presents key findings on long-term associations between TBI and cardiovascular disease, highlighting that nervous system dysfunction, neuroinflammation, changes in the brain-gut connection, and post-injury comorbidities may elevate risk of both cardiovascular ...
Doctors with long covid deserve more support
2023-09-21
Freelance journalist Adele Waters speaks to scores of doctors unable to work or play with their children, forced to sell their homes or facing financial destitution by an illness they caught while doing their jobs.
She hears of “shockingly low” access to protective equipment faced by many doctors in their workplaces, and how some have struggled for medical colleagues to take their symptoms seriously.
Charities that provide financial support to doctors in need have seen a sudden rise in demand, and now there are calls for long covid to be considered an occupational disease to help doctors and other healthcare workers access support and financial ...
Study shows morning and afternoon slightly better than evening physical activity for diabetes prevention
2023-09-21
New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]) shows that morning and afternoon physical activity are associated with a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes across all population levels of education and income, but found no statistically significant association between evening physical activity and risk type 2 diabetes. The study is by Dr Caiwei Tian, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, and Dr Chirag Patel, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. and colleagues.
Physical activity is a preventive factor for type 2 diabetes, but its timing and consistency (in contrast with overall sum of physical activity) ...
Monkeys cause a stink in response to human noise
2023-09-21
New research has found that monkeys increase their use of scent markings to compensate for human noise pollution.
Pied tamarins (Saguinus bicolor) use both vocal calls and scent markings to communicate, and the new study – published in the journal Ethology Ecology & Evolution – is the first to investigate how primates change their communication strategies in response to noise pollution.
The pied tamarin has an extremely narrow geographic range in central Brazil, much of which now lies within the city of ...
Prostate cancer upgrade, downgrade rates in PI-RADS 2.0 versus 2.1
2023-09-20
Leesburg, VA, September 20, 2023—According to an accepted manuscript published in the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), upgrade and downgrade rates from targeted biopsy to radical prostatectomy were not significantly different between patients whose MRI examinations were clinically interpreted using PI-RADS Version v2.0 or v2.1.
“Implementation of the most recent PI-RADS update did not improve the incongruence in prostate cancer grade assessment between targeted biopsy and surgery,” wrote corresponding author Baris Turkbey, MD, from the Molecular Imaging Branch ...
New recycling method fights plastic waste
2023-09-20
Almost 80% of plastic in the waste stream ends up in landfills or accumulates in the environment. Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have developed a technology that converts a conventionally unrecyclable mixture of plastic waste into useful chemicals, presenting a new strategy in the toolkit to combat global plastic waste.
The technology, invented by ORNL’s Tomonori Saito and former postdoctoral researcher Md Arifuzzaman, uses an exceptionally efficient organocatalyst that allows selective deconstruction ...
Low follow-up kidney testing after hospital discharge with moderate to severe AKI
2023-09-20
A study of Canadian hospitalizations from 2007-2019 show that over 75% of patients with moderate to severe acute kidney injury (AKI) do not get appropriate follow-up kidney health testing after hospital discharge.
A study in Alberta, Canada, examined care received by over 20,000 hospitalized with AKI during hospitalization and after discharge between 2009 and 2017. The results, recently published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases (AJKD), showed that a low proportion of patients with moderate to severe AKI were seen by a kidney specialist ...
Unzipping mRNA rallies plant cells to fight infection
2023-09-20
DURHAM, N.C. -- Living things from bacteria to plants to humans must constantly adjust the chemical soup of proteins -- the workhorse molecules of life -- inside their cells to adapt to stress or changing conditions, such as when nutrients are scarce, or when a pathogen attacks.
Now, researchers have identified a previously unknown molecular mechanism that helps explain how they do it.
Studying a spindly plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, a Duke University-led team discovered short snippets of folded RNA that, under normal conditions, keep levels of defense proteins low to avoid harming the plants themselves. But when the plants detect a pathogen, these folded RNA structures ...
New research findings: Understanding the sex life of coral gives hope of clawing it back from the path to extinction
2023-09-20
For the first time, scientists have mapped the reproductive strategies and life cycle of an endangered coral species, offering hope it can be clawed back from the path to extinction.
The purple cauliflower soft coral, Dendronephthya australis, is endemic to south-eastern Australia, with the largest populations historically found in the Port Stephens estuary in New South Wales. It is one of the 100 priority species on the Federal Government’s Threatened Species Strategy.
Not only is the future ...
New model for in vitro production of human brown fat cells lays groundwork for obesity, diabetes cell therapy
2023-09-20
Brown adipocytes are specialized cells that can use energy to produce heat. This property makes them attractive tools for the treatment of diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes. Until recently, this therapeutic potential was constrained by limited understanding of how brown adipocyte tissue (BAT) develops from precursors.
A team led by investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, identified a set of cellular signaling cues that lead up to brown ...