Marine Science Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-28-2003
Keywords
El Nino, interannual variability, sea level, tropical Pacific, volume
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1029/2003JC001835
Abstract
The question of whether or not the volume of the tropical Pacific changes over the course of an El Niño event has potentially important consequences for our understanding of the dynamical mechanisms responsible for El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. In this study, we examine the volume variability of the tropical Pacific, defined as the areal integral of the sea surface height variability, using TOPEX/Poseidon altimetric sea surface heights and the output of a numerical model. We find that volume gradually builds up in the tropical Pacific prior to a typical ENSO event and rapidly decreases during the event due to volume flux out of the tropics. However, our results confirm the findings of previous studies showing that volume change over the entire tropical Pacific does occur on ENSO timescales, but that this variability is small when compared to the volume redistribution within the tropical Pacific. In particular, there is a large volume flux into and out of the equatorial waveguide. Furthermore, we find that the volume variability of the tropical Pacific during ENSO can be almost entirely accounted for by variations in the temperature field.
Rights Information
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans, v. 108, issue C11, art. 3369
Copyright 2003 by the American Geophysical Union.
Scholar Commons Citation
Holland, Christina L. and Mitchum, Gary T., "Interannual Volume Variability in the Tropical Pacific" (2003). Marine Science Faculty Publications. 50.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/msc_facpub/50
