Wind and heat forcings of the seasonal and interannual sea level variabilities in the southwest Pacific

Abstract

Sea level variabilities in the southwest Pacific contribute to the variations of equatorial current bifurcation and the Indonesian Throughflow transport. These processes are closely related to the recharge/discharge of equatorial heat content and dynamic distribution of anthropogenic ocean heating over the Indo-Pacific basin, thus being of profound significance for climate variability and change. Here we identify the major features of seasonal and interannual sea level variabilities in this region, confirming the dominance of the first baroclinic mode in the tropics (contributing 60–80% of the variances) and higher baroclinic modes in the extra-tropics (40–60% of the seasonal variance). Seasonally, except in the western Coral Sea where the Ekman pumping is significant, the wind-driven first-mode baroclinic Rossby waves originating to the east of the dateline control the sea level variations over most tropical Pacific regions. In the domain where the 1.5-layer reduced gravity model becomes deficient, the surface heat fluxes dominate, explaining ~40–80% of sea level variance. For interannual variability, ~40–60% of the variance are El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-related. The wind-driven Rossby and Kelvin waves east of the dateline explain ~40–78% of the interannual variance in the tropical Pacific. Outside the tropics, small-scale diffusive processes are presumed critical for interannual variability according to a thermodynamic analysis using an eddy-permitting ocean model simulation. Further process and predictive understandings can be achieved with the coupled climate models properly parameterizing the sub-grid-scale processes.