Earth's Climate The Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction

About this book

It is more than 30 years since the publication of Jacob Bjerknes' groundbreaking ideas made clear the importance of ocean-atmosphere interaction in the tropics. It is now more than 20 years since the arrival of a massive El Niño in the fall of 1982 set off a cascade of observational and theoretical studies. During the following decades, the climate research community has made exceptional progress in refining our capacity to observe earth's climate and theorize about it, including new satellite-based and in situ monitoring systems and coupled ocean-atmosphere predictive numerical models. Of equal importance. is the expanding scope ofresearch, which now reaches far beyond the Pacific El Niño and includes climate phenomena in other ocean basins.

In order to cover the now global context of ocean-atmosphere interaction we have organized Earth's Climate around five principal themes, each introduced by one or more broad overview papers. Theme I covers interaction and climate variability in the Pacific sector, with extensive discussion of El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and with the possible causes and consequences of variability on both shorter and longer timescales. Theme II is devoted to interaction in the Atlantic sector. This basin exhibits complex behavior, reflecting its geographic location between two major zones of convection as well as neighboring the tropical Pacific. Theme III reviews the recent, exciting progress in our understanding of climate variability in the Indian sector. Theme IV addresses the interaction between the tropics and the extratropics, which are linked through the presence of shallow meridional overturning cells in the ocean. Finally, Theme V discusses overarching issues of cross-basin interaction.

Contents

Preface
      Chunzai Wang, Shang-Ping Xie, and James A. Carton vii
A Global Survey of Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction and Climate Variability
      Chunzai Wang, Shang-Ping Xie, and James A. Carton 1

Theme I: Pacific Climate Variability
Understanding ENSO Physics—A Review
      Chunzai Wang and Joel Picaut 21
Westerly Wind Events in the Tropical Pacific and Their Influence on the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere System: A Review
      Matthieu Lengaigne, Jean-Philippe Boulanger, Christophe Menkes, Pascale Delecluse, and Julia Slingo 49
The Control of Meridional Differential Surface Heating Over the Level of ENSO Activity: A Heat-Pump Hypothesis
      De-Zheng Sun 71
Broadening the Atmospheric Bridge Paradigm: ENSOTeleconnections to the Tropical West Pacific-Indian Oceans Over the Seasonal Cycle and to the North Pacific in Summer
      Michael A. Alexander, Ngar-Cheung Lau, and James D. Scott 85
Predicting Pacific Decadal Variability
      Richard Seager, Alicia R. Karspeck, Mark A. Cane, Yochanan Kushnir, Alessandra Giannini, Alexey Kaplan, Ben Kerman, and Jennifer Velez 105

Theme II: Tropical Atlantic Climate Variability
Tropical Atlantic Variability: Patterns, Mechanisms, and Impacts
      Shang-Ping Xie and James A. Carton 121
On the Role of the South Atlantic Atmospheric Circulation in Tropical Atlantic Variability
      Marcelo Barreiro, Alessandra Giannini, Ping Chang, and R. Saravanan 143
Toward Understanding Tropical Atlantic Variability Using Coupled Modeling Surgery
      Lixin Wu, QiongZhang, and Zhengyu Liu 157
Thermodynamic Coupling and Predictability of Tropical Sea Surface Temperature
      R. Saravanan and Ping Chang 171
Internal Variability of the Tropical Atlantic Ocean
      Markus Jochum, Raghu Murtugudde, Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli, and Antonio J. Busalacchi 181

Theme III: Indian Ocean Climate Variability
Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Variability in the Tropical Indian Ocean
      Toshio Yamagata, Swadhin K. Behera, Jing-Jia Luo, Sebastien Masson, Mark R. Jury, and Suryachandra A. Rao 189
Role of the Indian Ocean in Regional Climate Variability
      H. Annamalai and Raghu Murtugudde 213
Interannual Indian Rainfall Variability and Indian Ocean Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies
      Gabriel A. Vecchi and D. E. Harrison 247

Theme IV: Tropical-Extratropical Interaction
Shallow Overturning Circulations of the Tropical-Subtropical Oceans
      Friedrich A. Schott, Julian P. McCreary, Jr., and Gregory C. Johnson 261
Seasonal Variation of the Subtropical/Tropical Pathways in the Atlantic Ocean From an Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment
      Meyre P. Da Silva and Ping Chang 305
Gyre-Connected Variations Inferred From the Circulation Indices in the Northern Pacific Ocean
      Dongxiao Wang, Yun Liu, and Dejun Gu 319

Theme V: Cross-Basin Issues
Observed Associations Among Storm Tracks, Jet Streams and Midlatitude Oceanic Fronts
      Hisashi Nakamura, Takeaki Sampe, Youichi Tanimoto, and Akihiko Shimpo 329
The Relationship of Western Boundary Current Heat Transport and Storage to Midlatitude Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction
      Kathryn A. Kelly and Shenfu Dong  347
Two Different Regimes of Anomalous Walker Circulation Over the Indian and Pacific Oceans Before and After the Late 1970s
      Ryuichi Kawamura, Hiromitsu Aruga, Tomonori Matsuura, and Satoshi lizuka 365
Tropical Tropospheric Temperature and Precipitation Response to Sea Surface Temperature Forcing
      Hui Su, J. David Neelin, and Joyce E. Meyerson 379
Convection, Cloud-Radiative Feedbacks and Thermodynamic Ocean Coupling in Simple Models of the Walker Circulation
      Adam H. Sobel, Christopher S. Bretherton, Hezi Gildor, and Matthew E. Peters 393

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