A research team, including scientists from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, used two 150-year pre-industrial simulations of the Community Earth System Model to quantify the interactions between sea salt aerosol and El Niño. They found that variations in sea salt emissions over the tropical Pacific Ocean are affected by changing wind speed associated with El Niño cycle. The changes in sea salt could further perturb tropical surface temperature and enhance El Niño variability by 10 percent.