Abstract
The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) with worldwide socio-economic impacts has been presented to mature either in boreal summer or autumn, leading to the classification of summer IOD and autumn IOD. Investigating the climate dynamics to distinguish between these two types of IOD can improve our understanding and prediction of the surrounding weather and climate. This study demonstrates that the emergence of the summer IOD is mainly attributed to internal air-sea interactions in the western tropical Indian Ocean (WIO), while the autumn IOD is significantly related to ENSO development. For the summer IOD, broad-scaled warm sea surface temperature anomalies in the WIO are conducive to the enhancement of convective perturbations. Then local ocean–atmosphere feedback associated with changes in convection and surface heat flux into the upper ocean plays a key role in triggering the summer IOD. For the autumn IOD, strong easterly wind anomalies in the eastern Indian Ocean initiate oceanic Rossby waves and Bjerknes feedback, leading to the formation of both the western and eastern poles. It is recognized that these intensified easterly wind anomalies mostly benefit from ENSO variability. The distinctive features and air-sea interactions intrinsic to the summer IOD and the autumn IOD revealed in this study can further contribute to more credible predictive models of diverse IOD events.
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Data availability
The monthly HadISST1 datasets used during the current study are available at the https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/data/download.html. The ocean potential temperature, oceanic circulation data, total downward net surface heat flux, and SSH datasets from GODAS are available at the https://www.psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.godas.html. The surface wind and SLP datasets from NCEP-NCAR are available at the https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html. The OLR datasets from NOAA are available at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/outgoing-longwave-radiation-monthly/access/. The latent heat flux, sensible heat flux, longwave radiation, and shortwave radiation are available at the https://oaflux.whoi.edu/. The ocean potential temperature and oceanic circulation data from SODA 3.3.1 and ORAS5 are both available at http://apdrc.soest.hawaii.edu/data/data.php. The ERSST dataset is available at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/ersst/v5/netcdf/. The ERA5 dataset is available at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/.
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This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 92158204 and 42105052), the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2020YFA0608803), and an Innovation Group Project of the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai).
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All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. WZ, CQ and YT conceived the idea of the study. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by YT, WZ, and CQ. The first draft of the manuscript was written by YT, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. WZ and CQ supervised this study. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Tao, Y., Qiu, C., Zhong, W. et al. Distinctive characteristics and dynamics of the summer and autumn Indian ocean dipole events. Clim Dyn 62, 895–910 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06942-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06942-0