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Investigating the Relationship between Sea Surface Chlorophyll and Major Features of the South China Sea with Satellite Information
Published on: June 13, 2020
Tropical impacts of the Southern Ocean underestimated by mean-state biases
Yue Dong1, Kezhou Lu1, Yen-Ting Hwang2
1Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Abstract:
Observed sea-surface temperature (SST) trends over recent decades feature cooling in the tropical eastern Pacific and the Southern Ocean (SO). Growing evidence suggests that tropical cooling may partly stem from remote impacts of the SO. Using a hierarchy of multimodel simulations, we demonstrate that these teleconnections are robustly modulated by the mean-state intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ): Models with a more realistic ITCZ simulate a stronger tropical SST response to SO forcing via stronger wind-evaporation-SST feedback. When realistic Antarctic meltwater forcing is included, correcting a model's tropical mean-state bias yields a stronger tropical cooling response to meltwater-driven SO cooling, improving the agreement between simulated and observed SST trends. Our results suggest that the SO's contribution to tropical warming patterns is systematically underestimated due to model mean-state biases. Improving representations of the mean-state climate is therefore critical for accurately assessing large-scale climate responses associated with historical and future warming patterns.
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