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Indian Ocean and monsoon coupled interactions in a warming environment

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Abstract

Several studies have drawn attention to the steady warming of the equatorial and tropical Indian Ocean (IO) sea surface temperature (SST) observed during recent decades. An intriguing aspect of the IO SST warming trend is that it is has been accompanied by a pronounced weakening of the large-scale boreal summer monsoon circulation. Based on a detailed diagnostic analysis of observed datasets, reanalysis products and IPCC AR4 coupled model output, this study examines how the observed changes in the summer monsoon circulation could have contributed to this SST warming trend. The present results reveal that the weakening trend of the summer monsoon cross-equatorial flow has favored a reorientation of surface westerlies towards the equatorial IO during recent decades, relative to summer monsoons of earlier decades, which were dominated by stronger cross-equatorial flow. Our analysis suggests that the weakening of the summer monsoon cross-equatorial flow has in turn significantly accelerated the SST warming in the central equatorial IO. While the trend in the equatorial westerlies has promoted downwelling and thermocline deepening in the eastern equatorial IO, the central equatorial IO warming is attributed to reduced upwelling in response to a weakening trend of the wind-stress curl. The observed trends in Indian monsoon rainfall and the near-equatorial SST warming are shown to be closely related to variations in the meridional gradient of the monsoon zonal winds. An examination of the twentieth century simulations from 22 IPCC AR4 models, suggests that some models capture the recent equatorial IO warming associated with the weakened summer monsoon circulation reasonably well. The individual member models, however, exhibit significant inter-model variations in representing the observed response of the IO and monsoon coupled system.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Director, IITM, for the encouragement and support to carry out this research. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and the Editor Prof. Jean-Claude Duplessy for providing constructive comments and suggestions. We acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, US Dept. of Energy. This work is supported the Grant No. SR/FTP/ES-23/2008 received from by Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India. JMW’s support is from the National Science Foundation’s Climate Dynamics Program Office under Grant #1122989.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Climate Change Research, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, 411008, India

    Panickal Swapna & R. Krishnan

  2. Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    J. M. Wallace

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  1. Panickal Swapna
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Correspondence to Panickal Swapna.

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Fig. 14
figure 14

a The leading EOF of the meridional profile of zonal wind averaged from 70°E to 90°E along a section extending from 30°S to 30°N for the JJAS summer season. The black line is based on the ERA-40 dataset. The red line is based on the ERA Interim dataset. Both datasets cover the common period 1979–2001. b Time series of the corresponding PC

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Fig. 15
figure 15

a Trends in sea surface temperature (SST in °C per 62 years; the departure from the global mean SST) and NCEP surface winds (m s−1 per 60 years) in the tropical Indian Ocean (IO) for the summer monsoon season (June–September). Color shading indicates the magnitude of SST trends and the contour corresponds to 99 % confidence level based on the Student’s t test (see Balling et al. 1998). b Time-series of SST (°C) bars and NCEP zonal wind anomalies (m s−1, red lines) averaged over the equatorial IO (50°E–100°E, 5°S–5°N). The trend of the linear regression best-fit lines exceeds the 95 % confidence level

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Fig. 16
figure 16

The meridional profile of climatological −du/dy (×10−3 s−1, black line) and zonal wind (ms−1,red line) averaged longitudinally between 70°E and 90°E along a section extending from 40°S to 30°N for the JJAS summer monsoon season from ERA reanalysis. CV cyclonic vorticity, ACV anti-cyclonic vorticity

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Swapna, P., Krishnan, R. & Wallace, J.M. Indian Ocean and monsoon coupled interactions in a warming environment. Clim Dyn 42, 2439–2454 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1787-8

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