Composited sea surface responses to tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal during 2003-2020

Tropical cyclones (TCs) in the Bay of Bengal (BoB) caused significant changes in the sea surface as they passed through the sea. To quantitatively study the differences in oceanic responses caused by TCs during pre-monsoon and post-monsoon seasons in the BoB from 2003 to 2020 and the varying importance of TC intensity and translation speed in modulating oceanic responses, the oceanic environmental parameters affected by TCs were composited and analyzed. The spatial distributions show that the responses of sea surface temperature (SST) rather than chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations and sea surface salinity (SSS) coincided with the maximum response centers of the wind power index (WPi). All the temporal changes in SST, Chl-a, and SSS indicated that the changes induced by TCs began approximately 2-3 days before TC passage, continued to increase during cyclone passage, and then slowly returned to the initial state after at least 8 days. Compared with TC intensity, TC translation speed generally played a less important role in influencing the ocean responses of SST, Chl-a and SSS. This result is somewhat different from previous results in which the response of Chl-a was correlated with TC translation speed rather than TC intensity in the northern Indian Ocean. In addition, the SSS response was positively proportional (R = 0.886) to the TC translation speed in the BoB, which was different from that in the Northwest Pacific. The differences in the responses during pre-monsoon and post-monsoon seasons were mainly in terms of quantity, as all the composited results were similar. In addition, they were more pronounced in their responses but less significant in their correlations during pre-monsoon.