El Niño is the largest fluctuation in the climate system, and it can lead to effects influencing humans all over the world. An El Niño occurs when sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean become substantially higher than average. We investigated the change in sea surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean during the El Niño period of 2015 and 2016 using the advanced very-high-resolution radiometer (AVHRR) of NOAA Satellites. We calculated anomalies of the Pacific equatorial sea surface temperature for the normal period of 1981–2010 to identify the variation of the 2015 El Niño and warm water area. Generally, the warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean shifts eastward along the equator toward the coast of South America during an El Niño period. However, we identified an additional warm water region in the Niño 1+2 and Peru coastal area. This indicates that there are other factors that increase the sea surface temperature. In the future, we will study the heat coming from the bottom of the sea to understand the origin of the heat transport of the Pacific Ocean.
The atmospheric responses to a Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly(SSTA) over the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean have been investigated using the horizontally fine resolution model based on OSU 2-layer Atmospheric General Circulation Model(AGCM). The SSTAs during the peak phase of 1982-83 El Nin∼o have been applied to the model as the boundary conditions of the experiment. The model simulates the eastward movement of the rising branch of the Walker circulation. That is, the major features associated with the El Nin∼no such as the increase of the precipitation rate over the center of the Pacific and decrease over the Indonesia, and the 500hPa geopotential height anomaly in the middle latitude are properly described in the fine resolution model experiment. The model results indicate that this horizontally fine resolution GCM can successfully simulate the ENSO anomalies and be more effectivelly used for the study of the climate and the climate changes.