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Ocean atmosphere thermal decoupling in the eastern equatorial Indian ocean

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An Erratum to this article was published on 13 October 2016

Abstract

Eastern equatorial Indian ocean (EEIO) is one of the most climatically sensitive regions in the global ocean, which plays a vital role in modulating Indian ocean dipole (IOD) and El Niño southern oscillation (ENSO). Here we present evidences for a paradoxical and perpetual lower co-variability between sea-surface temperature (SST) and air-temperature (Tair) indicating instantaneous thermal decoupling in the same region, where signals of the strongly coupled variability of SST anomalies and zonal winds associated with IOD originate at inter-annual time scale. The correlation minimum between anomalies of Tair and SST occurs in the eastern equatorial Indian ocean warm pool region (≈70°E–100°E, 5°S–5°N), associated with lower wind speeds and lower sensible heat fluxes. At sub-monthly and Madden–Julian oscillation time scales, correlation of both variables becomes very low. In above frequencies, precipitation positively contributes to the low correlation by dropping Tair considerably while leaving SST without any substantial instant impact. Precipitation is led by positive build up of SST and post-facto drop in it. The strong semi-annual response of SST to mixed layer variability and equatorial waves, with the absence of the same in the Tair, contributes further to the weak correlation at the sub-annual scale. The limited correlation found in the EEIO is mainly related to the annual warming of the region and ENSO which is hard to segregate from the impacts of IOD.

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Acknowledgments

Ministry of Earth Sciences and Director INCOIS are acknowledged for the infrastructural support. Authors wish to acknowledge use of the Ferret program for data analysis and graphics in this paper. Ferret is a product of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. (Information is available at http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/Ferret/). We thank editor Dr. Jean-Claude Duplessy and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments which improved the quality of this work. Colleagues from MOG group at INCOIS are acknowledged for their support. This is INCOIS Publication NO: 266.

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  1. Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Ocean Valley, Pragathi Nagar, Hyderabad, 500090, India

    Sudheer Joseph, M. Ravichandran, B. Praveen Kumar & Raju V. Jampana

  2. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Weiqing Han

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  1. Sudheer Joseph
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In the original publication of this article the Fig. 9 was published incorrectly; this error has now been corrected.

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3379-x.

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Joseph, S., Ravichandran, M., Kumar, B.P. et al. Ocean atmosphere thermal decoupling in the eastern equatorial Indian ocean. Clim Dyn 49, 575–594 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3359-1

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