Ocean Dynamics

, Volume 60, Issue 5, pp 1255–1269 | Cite as

Coastal upwelling along the north coast of Papua New Guinea and El Niño events during 1981–2005

  • Takuya Hasegawa
  • Kentaro Ando
  • Keisuke Mizuno
  • Roger Lukas
  • Bunmei Taguchi
  • Hideharu Sasaki
Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between sea surface temperature (SST) cooling and upwelling along Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) north coast before the onset of El Niño events using a hindcast experiment with a high-resolution ocean general circulation model. Coastal upwelling and related SST cooling appear along PNG north coast during the boreal winter before the onsets of six El Niño events occurring during 1981–2005. Relatively cool SSTs appear along PNG north coast during that time, when anomalous northwesterly surface wind stress, which can cause coastal upwelling by offshore Ekman transport appearing over the region. In addition, anomalous cooling tendencies of SST are observed, accompanying anomalous upward velocities at the base of the mixed layer and shallow anomalies of 27°C isotherm depth. It is also shown that entrainment cooling plays an important role in the cooling of the mixed layer temperature in this region.

Keywords

Coastal upwelling El Niño events SST cooling Western equatorial Pacific 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors express their sincere thanks to members of the Research Institute for Global Change of JAMSTEC for many useful discussions. The authors also thank Akio Ishida for comments about the OFES hindcast experiment. Masanori Konda provided useful comments concerning the relationship between PNG coastal upwelling and the vertical velocity field. Sayaka Yasunaka gave a useful comment on the statistical significance check for the composite analysis. The OFES hindcast experiment was conducted on the Earth Simulator with the support of JAMSTEC. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments to help improve this study. This study was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), 19540459, Japan. RL was supported by the US National Science Foundation grant OCE-0752606.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • Takuya Hasegawa
    • 1
  • Kentaro Ando
    • 1
  • Keisuke Mizuno
    • 1
  • Roger Lukas
    • 2
  • Bunmei Taguchi
    • 3
  • Hideharu Sasaki
    • 3
  1. 1.Research Institute for Global ChangeJapan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and TechnologyYokosukaJapan
  2. 2.Department of OceanographyUniversity of Hawaii – ManoaHonoluluUSA
  3. 3.Earth Simulator CenterJapan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and TechnologyYokohamaJapan

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