El Niño on the Devil's Staircase: Annual Subharmonic Steps to Chaos

Fei-Fei Jin, J. David Neelin and Michael Ghil
Science, 1994.

Paper (PDF 784 KB)
© Copyright 1999 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Abstract The source of irregularity in El Niño, the large interannual climate variation of the Pacific ocean-atmosphere system, has remained elusive. Results from an El Niño model exhibit transition to chaos through a series of frequency-locked steps created by nonlinear resonance with the Earth's annual cycle. The overlapping of these resonances leads to the chaotic behavior. This transition scenario explains a number of climate-model results and produces spectral characteristics consistent with currently available data.

Citation. Jin, F.-F., J. D. Neelin and M. Ghil, 1994: El Niņo on the devil's staircase: annual subharmonic steps to chaos. Science, 1994, 264, 70-72.