Atmosphere-ocean interactions at strong couplings in a simple model of El Niño

The understanding of the dynamics of the El Niño-La Niña phenomenon in the tropical Pacific has been the subject of an impressive number of works in the last 20 years. The delayed oscillator theory provides an interpretative framework that has allowed enormous advances in understanding. Much evidence that stochastic forcing does play a role in the dynamics of ENSO has been discussed and it is possible to shape a theory of El Niño as a stochastically forced linear system. However, it is still uncertain if El Niño is a self-sustained nonlinear oscillatory system, a chaotic system, or a stochastically forced linear system. The authors propose in this paper that it is possible to have realistic El Niño probability distributions assuming that the system is a nonlinear stochastically forced system. In this paper a simple system is proposed that retains the main characteristics of the El Niño-La Niña variations, such as the skewness and the autocorrelation, and it is shown how solutions for the probability distribution can be obtained using a Fokker-Planck equation. © 2013 American Meteorological Society.