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Ocean mixed layer processes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in coupled general circulation models

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Abstract

It is investigated how the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is simulated differently among various coupled general circulation models (CGCMs), and how it is related to the heat budget of the simulated ocean mixed layer, which includes the surface heat flux and ocean heat transport. For this purpose the dataset of the climate of the 20th Century experiment (20C3M) from nine CGCMs reported to IPCC’s AR4 are used, while the MRI and MIROC models are examined in detail. Detailed analyses of these two CGCMs reveal that the PDO is mainly affected by ocean heat transport rather than surface heat flux, in particular in the MRI model which has a larger contribution of ocean heat transport to the heat budget. It is found that the ocean heat transport due to Ekman advection versus geostrophic advection contributes differently to the PDO in the western and central North Pacific. Specifically, the strength of PDO tends to be larger for CGCMs with a larger ocean heat transport in the region.

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Notes

  1. Output data of vertical velocity and eddy diffusivity are not available in the CMIP3 dataset, therefore, we obtain the OHT by subtracting the SHF from the HCV.

  2. As mentioned on Sect. 2.2, the leading EOF here is multiplied by the standard deviation of the first PC to compare the strength of the PDO in various CGCMs. Thus, the magnitude of the leading EOFs averaged over each region is considered as the strength of the PDO in this study.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the international modeling groups for providing their data for analysis, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) for collecting and archiving the model data, the JSC/CLIVAR Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) and their Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and Climate Simulation Panel for organizing the model data analysis activity, and the IPCC WG1 TSU for technical support. The IPCC Data Archive at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy. This work was supported by the “National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST)” (NRF-2009-C1AAA001-2009-0093042). Y. Noh was funded by the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program under Grant CATER 2012-6090. B. Qiu was supported by NSF through grant OCE-0926594.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology, Ansan, South Korea

    Bo Young Yim, Jong-Seong Kug & Hong Sik Min

  2. Department of Atmospheric Sciences/Global Environmental Laboratory, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

    Yign Noh

  3. Department of Environmental Marine Science, Hanyang University, ERICA Campus, Ansan, 426-791, South Korea

    Sang-Wook Yeh

  4. Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Bo Qiu

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  1. Bo Young Yim
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Correspondence to Sang-Wook Yeh.

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Yim, B.Y., Noh, Y., Yeh, SW. et al. Ocean mixed layer processes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in coupled general circulation models. Clim Dyn 41, 1407–1417 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1630-7

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