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The de-correlation of westerly winds and westerly-wind stress over the Southern Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum

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Abstract

Motivated by indications from paleo-evidence, this paper investigates the changes of the Southern Westerly Winds (SWW) and westerly-wind stress between the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and pre-industrial in the PMIP3/CMIP5 simulations, highlighting the role of Antarctic sea ice in modulating the wind effect on ocean. Particularly, a de-correlation occurs between the changes in SWW and westerly-wind stress, caused primarily by an equatorward expansion of winter Antarctic sea ice that undermines the efficacy of wind in generating stress over the liquid ocean. Such de-correlation may reflect the LGM condition in reality, in view of the fact that the model which simulates this condition has most fidelity in simulating modern SWW and Antarctic sea ice. Therein two models stand out for their agreements with paleo-evidence regarding the change of SWW and the westerly-wind stress. They simulate strengthened and poleward-migrated LGM SWW in the atmosphere, consistent with the indications from dust records. Whilst in the ocean, they well capture an equatorward-shifted pattern of the observed oceanic front shift, with most pronounced equatorward-shifted westerly wind stress during the LGM.

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Acknowledgments

This work is primarily supported by NSF AGS-1249145. Jian Lu and L. Ruby Leung were partly supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy as part of the Regional and Global Climate Modeling program. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CASPO, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA

    Wei Liu & Shang-Ping Xie

  2. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Wei Liu, Jian Lu & L. Ruby Leung

  3. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Nelson Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Zhengyu Liu & Jiang Zhu

  4. LaCOAS, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Zhengyu Liu

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  1. Wei Liu
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  2. Jian Lu
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Correspondence to Wei Liu.

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Liu, W., Lu, J., Leung, L.R. et al. The de-correlation of westerly winds and westerly-wind stress over the Southern Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum. Clim Dyn 45, 3157–3168 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2530-4

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