Understanding the Equatorial Pacific Cold Tongue Time-Mean Heat Budget. Part I: Diagnostic Framework
2018
AbstractThe Pacific equatorial cold tongue plays a leading role in Earth’s strongest and most predictable climate signals. To illuminate the processes governing cold tongue temperatures, the upper-ocean heat budget is explored using the GFDL-
FLORcoupled GCM (the forecast-oriented low ocean resolution version of CM2.5). Starting from the exact temperature budget for layers of time-varying thickness, the layer temperature tendency terms are studied using hourly-, daily-, and monthly-mean output from a 30-yr simulation driven by present-day
radiative forcings. The budget is then applied to 1) a surface mixed layer whose temperature is highly correlated with SST, in which the air–sea heat flux is balanced mainly by downward diffusion of heat across the layer base, and 2) a thicker
advectivelayer that subsumes most of the vertical mixing, in which the air–sea heat flux is balanced mainly by monthly-scale
advection. The surface warming from
shortwavefluxes and submonthly meridional
advectionand the subsurfa...
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