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Heat balance and eddies in the Peru-Chile current system

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Abstract

The Peru-Chile current System (PCS) is a region of persistent biases in global climate models. It has strong coastal upwelling, alongshore boundary currents, and mesoscale eddies. These oceanic phenomena provide essential heat transport to maintain a cool oceanic surface underneath the prevalent atmospheric stratus cloud deck, through a combination of mean circulation and eddy flux. We demonstrate these behaviors in a regional, quasi-equilibrium oceanic model that adequately resolves the mesoscale eddies with climatological forcing. The key result is that the atmospheric heating is large (>50 W m−2) over a substantial strip >500 km wide off the coast of Peru, and the balancing lateral oceanic flux is much larger than provided by the offshore Ekman flux alone. The atmospheric heating is weaker and the coastally influenced strip is narrower off Chile, but again the Ekman flux is not sufficient for heat balance. The eddy contribution to the oceanic flux is substantial. Analysis of eddy properties shows strong surface temperature fronts and associated large vorticity, especially off Peru. Cyclonic eddies moderately dominate the surface layer, and anticyclonic eddies, originating from the nearshore poleward Peru-Chile Undercurrent (PCUC), dominate the subsurface, especially off Chile. The sensitivity of the PCS heat balance to equatorial intra-seasonal oscillations is found to be small. We demonstrate that forcing the regional model with a representative, coarse-resolution global reanalysis wind product has dramatic and deleterious consequences for the oceanic circulation and climate heat balance, the eddy heat flux in particular.

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Notes

  1. http://www.marine.csiro.au/~dunn/cars2006/

  2. Off Peru the shelf is about 100 km wide, while it is much narrower off Chile. Estrade et al. (2008) show that both the location of the upwelling and its width vary with the topography.

  3. Alongshore averaging over 7 (Peru) to 10 (Chile) degrees increases the number of independent realizations by a factor of at least 3 (off Peru where the deformation radius, and hence the eddy correlation length, is largest). Off Chile the factor may be closer to 10.

  4. The transition region between Peru and Chile (17–22°S) is where most VOCALS measurements were made. It has a heat balance somewhat similar to Peru.

  5. This is different from the Equatorial Undercurrent, as sometimes suggested in previous studies that are based on coarse-resolution models (e.g., Cravatte et al. 2007).

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Acknowledgments

Support was provided by the Office of Naval Research, grant N00014-08-1-0597 and the National Science Foundation, grant ATM-0747533 (VOCALS program). The altimeter products were produced by SSALTO-DUACS and distributed by AVISO with support from CNES. The AVHRR-Pathfinder SST data were obtained from the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The CARS climatology is from the CSIRO Marine Laboratories. The sea surface temperature product OSTIA is from U.K. Meteorological Office data. Some of the computations were made at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). We thank Alexander Shchepetkin for his sustained effort to improve the ROMS model and thorough knowledge of parallel computing.

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  1. Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1567, USA

    François Colas, James C. McWilliams & Jaison Kurian

  2. Laboratoire de Physique des Oceans, Ifremer, Plouzane, France

    Xavier Capet

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  1. François Colas
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Correspondence to François Colas.

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Colas, F., McWilliams, J.C., Capet, X. et al. Heat balance and eddies in the Peru-Chile current system. Clim Dyn 39, 509–529 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-011-1170-6

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