Testing the robustness of El Niño flavors

Abstract

The variability of the warm-phase events of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon has been under the microscope for the past few decades, with some authors proposing the existence of different types, called flavors, of El Niño events. Here we give an overview of the literature concerning spatial patterns of the sea surface temperature anomalies in the equatorial Pacifc and the flavors of El Niño. We also use Monte Carlo re-sampling with replacement to examine whether there are signifcant differences among two flavors of El Niño as defined by one criterion in particular and touch on the possible classifcation of the most recent 2015-16 event.