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. 2019 Jul 29;9:10993. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-47400-4

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Comparison of relevant time series. (a) Time series of the Niño3.4 index (average SST anomaly in the region 5°S–5°N, 150°W–90°W) from January 1958 to December 2015. (b) SST anomaly index along the USWC (SST_C) computed as the SST anomaly averaged in the strip 30°N to 55°N and the coast to approximately 300 km offshore. (c) Index describing the evolution of the sensitivity pattern in Fig. 3a. This sensitivity pattern is obtained using equation 1 with a lead time τ = 9 months. The associated index (Opt9) is calculated by projecting SST and SSH anomaly fields onto the sensitivity pattern. Thus, the values of Opt9 at each time correspond to the uncentered pattern correlation of the observed SST/SSH fields with the sensitivity pattern. Gray vertical bars identify two El Niño events (1982/83 and 1997/98) that were associated with large values of SST_C, light green bars indicate two El Niño events (1972/73 and 2009/10) that corresponded to very small values of SST_C, and the light blue bar highlights the 2014 case, where strong warming along the USWC was associated with small values of the Niño-3.4 index.