Photo courtesy Céline Le Helley

The 4th CLIVAR workshop on the evaluation of El Niño / Southern Oscillation (ENSO) processes in climate models was held at Sorbonne-Universités in Paris in July 2015, in conjunction with the UNESCO “Our Common Future Under Climate Change” conference. The workshop, hosted by IPSL and attended by 50 experts including 12 early-career scientists (see Appendix for the list of participants), was organized as part of a new International CLIVAR Research Focus on “ENSO in a changing climate.”  The workshop built upon a February 2015 workshop in Sydney, Australia, which focused on ENSO diversity and extremes.  It also entrained members of the US CLIVAR working group on ENSO diversity, which has focused attention on understanding the substantial inter-event differences in ENSO mechanisms and impacts (see recent review by Capotondi et al., BAMS 2015).  The workshop was co-sponsored by USCLIVAR, NOAA/ESS and NOAA/MAPP. The timing of the Paris workshop was auspicious, as it was concurrent with the development of a strong El Niño in the Pacific, just one year after an aborted El Niño.

The summary of this workshop has been accepted by BAMS and is available on its Early Online Releases:

Guilyardi, E., A. Wittenberg, M. Balmaseda, W. Cai, M. Collins, M. McPhaden, M. Watanabe, and S.-W. Yeh, 2016: ENSO in a changing climate: Meeting summary of the 4th CLIVAR workshop on the evaluation of ENSO processes in climate models.  Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., in press.  10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00287.1. 

It can be either accessed on BAMS website or downloaded from CLIVAR ENSO Research Focus webpage.