Climate variability and predictability associated with the Indo-Pacific Oceanic Channel Dynamics in the CCSM4 Coupled System Model -- Journal of Oceanology and Limnology,2017,35(1):23-38

	Cite this paper:
	YUAN Dongliang, XU Peng, XU Tengfei. Climate variability and predictability associated with the Indo-Pacific Oceanic Channel Dynamics in the CCSM4 Coupled System Model[J]. Journal of Oceanology and Limnology, 2017, 35(1): 23-38

Climate variability and predictability associated with the Indo-Pacific Oceanic Channel Dynamics in the CCSM4 Coupled System Model

YUAN Dongliang^1,2, XU Peng^1,3, XU Tengfei⁴

1 Key Laboratory of Ocean Circulation and Waves(KLOCAW), Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao 266071, China;
2 Qingdao Collaborative Innovation Center of Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266003, China;
3 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China;
4 First Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration, Qingdao 266061, China

Abstract:

An experiment using the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4), a participant of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase-5 (CMIP5), is analyzed to assess the skills of this model in simulating and predicting the climate variabilities associated with the oceanic channel dynamics across the Indo-Pacific Oceans. The results of these analyses suggest that the model is able to reproduce the observed lag correlation between the oceanic anomalies in the southeastern tropical Indian Ocean and those in the cold tongue in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean at a time lag of 1 year. This success may be largely attributed to the successful simulation of the interannual variations of the Indonesian Throughflow, which carries the anomalies of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) into the western equatorial Pacific Ocean to produce subsurface temperature anomalies, which in turn propagate to the eastern equatorial Pacific to generate ENSO. This connection is termed the "oceanic channel dynamics" and is shown to be consistent with the observational analyses. However, the model simulates a weaker connection between the IOD and the interannual variability of the Indonesian Throughflow transport than found in the observations. In addition, the model overestimates the westerly wind anomalies in the western-central equatorial Pacific in the year following the IOD, which forces unrealistic upwelling Rossby waves in the western equatorial Pacific and downwelling Kelvin waves in the east. This assessment suggests that the CCSM4 coupled climate system has underestimated the oceanic channel dynamics and overestimated the atmospheric bridge processes.

Received: 2015-06-12 Revised: 2015-08-15

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