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Processes of India’s offshore summer intraseasonal sea surface temperature variability

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Abstract

Active and break phases of the Indian summer monsoon are associated with sea surface temperature (SST) fluctuations at 30–90 days timescale in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. Mechanisms responsible for basin-scale intraseasonal SST variations have previously been discussed, but the maxima of SST variability are actually located in three specific offshore regions: the South-Eastern Arabian Sea (SEAS), the Southern Tip of India (STI) and the North-Western Bay of Bengal (NWBoB). In the present study, we use an eddy-permitting 0.25° regional ocean model to investigate mechanisms of this offshore intraseasonal SST variability. Modelled climatological mixed layer and upper thermocline depth are in very good agreement with estimates from three repeated expendable bathythermograph transects perpendicular to the Indian Coast. The model intraseasonal forcing and SST variability agree well with observed estimates, although modelled intraseasonal offshore SST amplitude is undere-stimated by 20–30 %. Our analysis reveals that surface heat flux variations drive a large part of the intraseasonal SST variations along the Indian coastline while oceanic processes have contrasted contributions depending of the region considered. In the SEAS, this contribution is very small because intraseasonal wind variations are essentially cross-shore, and thus not associated with significant upwelling intraseasonal fluctuations. In the STI, vertical advection associated with Ekman pumping contributes to ∼30 % of the SST fluctuations. In the NWBoB, vertical mixing diminishes the SST variations driven by the atmospheric heat flux perturbations by 40 %. Simple slab ocean model integrations show that the amplitude of these intraseasonal SST signals is not very sensitive to the heat flux dataset used, but more sensitive to mixed layer depth.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India for the support through INCOIS, Hyderabad for conducting systematic XBT surveys. JV and ML are funded by Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) and did part of this work while visiting the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO, India). KN acknowledges the financial support from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India. This work was performed using HPC resources from GENCI-IDRIS (grant 2009-011140). This is NIO contribution number 5332.

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  1. Physical Oceanography Division, National Institute of Oceanography (CSIR), Dona Paula, Goa, 403004, India

    Nisha Kurian, Matthieu Lengaigne, Gopalakrishna Venkata Vissa & Shweta Naik

  2. LOCEAN, IRD/CNRS/UPMC/MNHN, Paris, France

    Matthieu Lengaigne, Jerome Vialard, Stephane Pous & Anne-Charlotte Peter

  3. LEGOS, IRD/CNRS/CNES/UPS, Toulouse, France

    Fabien Durand

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  1. Nisha Kurian
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Correspondence to Nisha Kurian.

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Kurian, N., Lengaigne, M., Vissa, G.V. et al. Processes of India’s offshore summer intraseasonal sea surface temperature variability. Ocean Dynamics 63, 329–346 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-013-0604-6

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