Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Health: An Overview for Climate and Health Researchers

McGregor, G.R.; Ebi, K.

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Health: An Overview for Climate and Health Researchers Thumbnail


Authors

K. Ebi



Abstract

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an important mode of climatic variability that exerts a discernible impact on ecosystems and society through alterations in climate patterns. For this reason, ENSO has attracted much interest in the climate and health science community, with many analysts investigating ENSO health links through considering the degree of dependency of the incidence of a range of climate diseases on the occurrence of El Niño events. Because of the mounting interest in the relationship between ENSO as a major mode of climatic variability and health, this paper presents an overview of the basic characteristics of the ENSO phenomenon and its climate impacts, discusses the use of ENSO indices in climate and health research, and outlines the present understanding of ENSO health associations. Also touched upon are ENSO-based seasonal health forecasting and the possible impacts of climate change on ENSO and the implications this holds for future assessments of ENSO health associations. The review concludes that there is still some way to go before a thorough understanding of the association between ENSO and health is achieved, with a need to move beyond analyses undertaken through a purely statistical lens, with due acknowledgement that ENSO is a complex non-canonical phenomenon, and that simple ENSO health associations should not be expected.

Citation

McGregor, G., & Ebi, K. (2018). El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Health: An Overview for Climate and Health Researchers. Atmosphere, 9(7), Article 282. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos9070282

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 16, 2018
Online Publication Date Jul 19, 2018
Publication Date Jul 19, 2018
Deposit Date Jul 18, 2018
Publicly Available Date Jul 26, 2018
Journal Atmosphere
Electronic ISSN 2073-4433
Publisher MDPI
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Issue 7
Article Number 282
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos9070282
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1353889

Files

Published Journal Article (19.5 Mb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).






You might also like



Downloadable Citations