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The impact of sea surface temperature bias on equatorial Atlantic interannual variability in partially coupled model experiments
Author(s) -
Ding Hui,
Greatbatch Richard J.,
Latif Mojib,
Park Wonsun
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2015gl064799
Subject(s) - predictability , sea surface temperature , climatology , wind stress , environmental science , heat flux , flux (metallurgy) , tropical atlantic , atlantic equatorial mode , coupling (piping) , atmospheric sciences , boreal , geology , atlantic multidecadal oscillation , physics , heat transfer , materials science , thermodynamics , paleontology , quantum mechanics , metallurgy
We examine the impact of sea surface temperature (SST) bias on interannual variability during boreal summer over the equatorial Atlantic using two suites of partially coupled model (PCM) experiments with and without surface heat flux correction. In the experiments, surface wind stress anomalies are specified from observations while the thermodynamic coupling between the atmospheric and oceanic components is still active as in the fully coupled model. The results show that the PCM can capture around 50% of the observed variability associated with the Atlantic Niño from 1958 to 2013, but only when the bias is substantially reduced using heat flux correction, with no skill otherwise. We further show that ocean dynamics explain a large part of the SST variability in the eastern equatorial Atlantic in both observations (50–60%) and the PCM experiments (50–70%) with heat flux correction, implying that the seasonal predictability potential may be higher than currently thought.