Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 37 (2007): 1163-1176, doi:10.1175/jpo3060.1.
Description:
The circulation in the equatorial Pacific Ocean is studied in a series of numerical experiments based on an isopycnal coordinate model. The model is subject to monthly mean climatology of wind stress and surface thermohaline forcing. In response to decadal variability in the diapycnal mixing coefficient, sea surface temperature and other properties of the circulation system oscillate periodically. The strongest sea surface temperature anomaly appears in the geographic location of Niño-3 region with the amplitude on the order of 0.5°C, if the model is subject to a 30-yr sinusoidal oscillation in diapycnal mixing coefficient that varies between 0.03 × 10−4 and 0.27 × 10−4 m2 s−1. Changes in diapycnal mixing coefficient of this amplitude are within the bulk range consistent with the external mechanical energy input in the global ocean, especially when considering the great changes of tropical cyclones during the past decades. Thus, time-varying diapycnal mixing associated with changes in wind energy input into the ocean may play a nonnegligible role in decadal climate variability in the equatorial circulation and climate.
Description:
CJH and WW were supported by
The National Natural Science Foundation of China
through Grant 40476010 and National Basic Research
Priorities Programmer of China through Grant
2005CB422302. RXH was supported by the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through
CICOR Cooperative Agreement NA17RJ1223 to the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This study is
also supported through the Chinese 111 Project under
Contract B07036.
Keywords:
Climate variability
;
Mixing
;
El Nino
;
Isopycnal coordinates
;
Pacific Ocean
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
