Response to Comment on "No consistent ENSO response to volcanic forcing over the last millennium"

Robock claims that our analysis fails to acknowledge that pan-tropical surface cooling caused by large volcanic eruptions may mask El Niño warming at our central Pacific site, potentially obscuring a volcano–El Niño connection suggested in previous studies. Although observational support for a dynamical response linking volcanic cooling to El Niño remains ambiguous, Robock raises some important questions about our study that we address here. Modeling studies suggest that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is sensitive to sulfate aerosol forcing associated with explosive volcanism, yet observational support for a dynamical chain of events linking large volcanic cooling to El Niño occurrences remains inconclusive. In Dee et al. (1), we used absolutely dated fossil corals from the central tropical Pacific to test ENSO's response to large volcanic eruptions. Superposed epoch analysis reveals a weak tendency for an El Niño–like response in the year after an eruption, but this response is not statistically significant, nor does it appear after the outsized 1257 Samalas eruption.