Fig. 3: Present-day El Niño teleconnection constrains future SOHS changes.
From: Southern Ocean heat buffer constrained by present-day ENSO teleconnection
a An inter-model regression pattern of projected changes in SOHS onto present-day El Niño teleconnection pattern (ZJ per degree C of global warming per (N m−2 s.d.−1)). The dotted area indicates where the correlation coefficient is significant above the 95% confidence level based on a Student’s t-test. The black box indicates the region where we calculated the regional average of present-day El Niño induced easterlies to constrain the SO heat content changes. b An inter-model relationship between present-day El Niño teleconnection averaged over 0°–360°E, 55°S–65°S and projected SOHS changes. The vertical red line indicates the observed El Niño teleconnection from 1948 to 2020 with dotted lines indicating one standard deviation range (see Methods). The solid black line shows the linear regression across the CMIP6 ensemble, and the dashed black lines show the prediction errors for the linear fit (one standard deviation range). The correlation coefficient, slope and p-value are all indicated. The projected SOHS could be constrained by the present-day ENSO teleconnection.
