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Processes of India's offshore summer intraseasonal sea surface temperature variability

DRS at CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography

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Title Processes of India's offshore summer intraseasonal sea surface temperature variability
 
Creator Kurian, N.
Lengaigne, M.
Gopalakrishna, V.V.
Vialard, J.
Pous, S.
Peter, A-C.
Durand, F.
Naik, Shweta
 
Subject surface temperature
variability
 
Description Active and break phases of the Indian summer monsoon are associated with sea surface temperature (SST) fluctuations at 30-90 days timescale in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. Mechanisms responsible for basin-scale intraseasonal SST variations have previously been discussed, but the maxima of SST variability are actually located in three specific offshore regions: the South-Eastern Arabian Sea (SEAS), the Southern Tip of India (STI) and the North-Western Bay of Bengal (NWBoB). In the present study, we use an eddy-permitting 0.25 degrees regional ocean model to investigate mechanisms of this offshore intraseasonal SST variability. Modelled climatological mixed layer and upper thermocline depth are in very good agreement with estimates from three repeated expendable bathythermograph transects perpendicular to the Indian Coast. The model intraseasonal forcing and SST variability agree well with observed estimates, although modelled intraseasonal offshore SST amplitude is undere-stimated by 20-30 percent. Our analysis reveals that surface heat flux variations drive a large part of the intraseasonal SST variations along the Indian coastline while oceanic processes have contrasted contributions depending of the region considered. In the SEAS, this contribution is very small because intraseasonal wind variations are essentially cross-shore, and thus not associated with significant upwelling intraseasonal fluctuations. In the STI, vertical advection associated with Ekman pumping contributes to approx. 30 percent of the SST fluctuations. In the NWBoB, vertical mixing diminishes the SST variations driven by the atmospheric heat flux perturbations by 40 percent. Simple slab ocean model integrations show that the amplitude of these intraseasonal SST signals is not very sensitive to the heat flux dataset used, but more sensitive to mixed layer depth.
 
Date 2013-06-17T06:34:26Z
2013-06-17T06:34:26Z
2013
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Ocean Dynamics, vol.63; 2013; 329-346
no
http://drs.nio.org/drs/handle/2264/4299
 
Language en
 
Relation Ocean_Dyn_63_329.jpg
 
Rights An edited version of this paper was published by Springer. This paper is for R & D purpose and Copyright [2013] Springer.
 
Publisher Springer