/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11291227

Yes, Climate change is affecting frequently of Indian ocean dipole.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-climate-change-may-make-australia-wildfires-more-common

>Australia’s fire managers have kept an eye on one culprit that’s behind particularly hot, dry years in eastern Australia and that may be affected by global warming: an oscillating El Niño–like ocean-atmosphere weather pattern that begins in the Indian Ocean.

>“Indian Ocean dipole” pattern has positive, negative and neutral phases, depending on whether eastern or western Indian Ocean waters are warmer than average. The more extreme the temperature difference between the ocean’s eastern and western regions, the stronger the phase. When the Indian Ocean dipole is in a particularly strong positive phase — as it was in 2019 — it correlates to some of Australia’s worst fire seasons, says climate scientist Wenju Cai of CSIRO who is based in Melbourne, Australia.

>Global warming is likely to make such extreme positive phases much more common, Cai says. In a 2014 study in Nature, he and colleagues simulated future sea-surface temperature changes in the Indian Ocean in a world where greenhouse gas emissions continue on a “business-as-usual” track (SN: 1/7/20). The team found that, under that scenario, the frequency of extreme positive-phase events could increase from about once every 17 years to about once every six years.

>All the major bushfires in southeastern Australia are preceded by [a positive] Indian Ocean dipole. For example, in 2009, [such a dipole preceded] a bushfire called Black Saturday that killed 173 people in Melbourne in just a few hours, and destroyed more than 2,000 houses.

>also a [positive] dipole before the 1997 bushfire in Indonesia, which lasted many months and created haze affecting tens of millions of people and really hit the economy there. The 2019 dipole is second [in strength] only to 1997 in the historical record going back to 1870.