Abstract
Seasonal-to-decadal variability of spice injection in the upper ocean of the subtropical southeastern Pacific (SEP) is investigated using 3-day and 0.25° simulations spanning from 1992 to 2016 in the Consortium for Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean. The spice injection refers to convective mixing through which saline water in the mixed layer is injected into the interior to generate positive temperature and salinity anomalies or spiciness anomaly (SPA). Results show that the spice injection in the SEP occurs during austral winter when the mixed layer is deep, and it leads to a positive SPA in the interior. The interior SPA is found to experience significant interannual variability, which is well correlated with winter mixed layer depth (MLD), with more interior SPA corresponding to deeper MLD. During a strong winter of injection, the interior spiciness change rate can reach up to ~ 0.005 kg m−3 day−1 and the gain of spiciness in the interior ~ 0.2 kg m−3 over the SEP region. The interannual-decadal variability of interior SPA in the SEP has a significantly negative correlation to the low-frequency El Niño–Southern Oscillation index, with larger (smaller) SPA during La Niña (El Niño) conditions.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41676002 and 41976006). Y. Wang would like to acknowledge the support from the China Scholarship Council. The ECCO data are available at http://apdrc.soest.hawaii.edu/dods/public_data/ECCO/ECCO2/ cube92/. ISAS-15 data are downloaded from Sea Scientific Open Data Publication website http://www.seanoe.org/data/00412/52367/. The observational monthly precipitation and evaporation data are obtained from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project version 2.3 (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/global-precipitation-climatology-project-gpcp-monthly/access/) and the OAFlux version 3 (ftp://ftp.whoi.edu/pub/science/oaflux/data_v3). The net surface heat flux products are obtained from the ECMWF dataset (https://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-mdfa/levtype=sfc/). The ENSO index is downloaded from https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/cathy.smith/best/.
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Wang, Y., Luo, Y. Variability of spice injection in the upper ocean of the southeastern Pacific during 1992–2016. Clim Dyn 54, 3185–3200 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05164-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05164-y