El Nino/Southern Oscillation and Selected Environmental Consequences

The paper presents a review of El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and selected environmental consequences at a range of spatial scales. The fundamentals of ENSO are summarized in a descriptive way, and the reader is provided with the key facts from the history of ENSO research as well as with recent developments in understanding the oscillation. Subsequently, a discussion on a potential initial driving force that begins the warm ENSO episode is given, and the inference is limited to the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation which may be controlled by solar forcing. Later, the insight into the ENSO history is provided, with a scrutiny about the most recent phenomena and the ENSO variability over the geological time. The core section of the paper focuses on three environmental consequences of ENSO: irregular fluctuations of the Earth Orientation Parameters (EOPs), climatic and hydrologic teleconnections that allow migration of the ENSO signal to remote regions of the Earth (the teleconnections are explained using the specific European example), and sea level change in the equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans. The instances explain that ENSO is a phenomenon that impacts the dynamics of the entire Earth and controls some geophysical and environmental parameters of the atmosphere and hydrosphere at regional and local scales.