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A tropical warm pool in the Indian Ocean and its influence on ENSO over the past 137, 000 yrs BP

DRS at CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography

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Title A tropical warm pool in the Indian Ocean and its influence on ENSO over the past 137, 000 yrs BP
 
Creator Saraswat, R.
Nigam, R.
Weldeab, S.
Mackensen, A.
 
Subject El-Nino
sea surface temperature
Indian Ocean
tropical region
 
Description The tropical sea surface temperature (SST) is one of the important factors that regulates the amount and duration of rainfall in the tropical region, the world’s most densely populated region. The tropical oceanic warm pool today extends across the Pacific and Indian oceans. The geographic extent of warm pool shows annual variability, leading to changing east-west gradients in tropical SST that contribute to El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and other related processes of the tropical circulation. From the magnesium–calcium analysis of planktic foraminifera, we reconstructed SST in the Indian Ocean over the past 137,000 years, providing a new reconstruction of the changing extent of the warm pool, the east-west gradients and their influence on ENSO through time. Comparison of our results with those from the Pacific Ocean shows that throughout the larger part of the last approx. 137 ka BP, equatorial Indian Ocean (EIO) was the warmest part of the tropics. However, the eastern Pacific Ocean (EEP) was warmer than both the western Pacific Ocean (WEP) and EIO for a brief period during penultimate glacial-interglacial transition. The SST difference between EIO and EEP as well as between WEP and EEP shows strong positive correlation over the entire period of approx. 137 ka BP, suggesting that during the large part of the past glacial period, more intense and frequent El-Nino-like conditions persisted and influenced the tropical Indian and Pacific oceans.
 
Date 2007-05-08T11:06:00Z
2007-05-08T11:06:00Z
2007
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Current Science, vol.92(8), 1153-1156pp.
http://drs.nio.org/drs/handle/2264/603
 
Language en
 
Rights Full-text of the paper hosted with the permission from Publisher.
 
Format 122571 bytes
application/pdf
 
Publisher Indian Academy of Sciences