U.S. Dept. of Commerce / NOAA / OAR / PMEL / Publications

The upper ocean heat balance in the western equatorial Pacific warm pool during September-December 1992

Meghan F. Cronin and Michael J. McPhaden

Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, NOAA, Seattle, Washington

Journal of Geophysical Research, 102(C4), 8533-8553 (1997)
This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. Published in 1997 by the American Geophysical Union.

8. Conclusion

This study represents one of the first analyses in which the full three-dimensional heat balance of the western equatorial Pacific warm pool has been estimated on timescales associated with westerly wind burst forcing in the western equatorial Pacific warm pool. The analysis is based on unique in situ time series measurements collected during TOGA-COARE to determine surface heat fluxes, upper ocean temperature and salinity variability, and upper ocean currents. These data have allowed for a quantitative assessment of the processes affecting SST, a variable of significant climatic importance in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system.

The variability in the heat balance observed during the 3-month study period highlights the fact that long time series are required to obtain mean values of sources and sinks of heat in the warm pool. As discussed in section 4 and shown in Figures 6, 9, and 10, over the course of a wind burst the net surface heat flux can change sign, being a warming process prior to and following the wind burst, and an equally strong cooling process during the wind burst. Horizontal heat advection also is highly variable due to variations in the temperature gradients and reversals in the surface current direction. Additionally, the depth of the thermocline has variability that affects entrainment cooling and heat storage rate. Thus, high-quality data obtained during COARE within the framework of the TAO enhanced monitoring array have provided an ideal data set for analyzing the complexity of these and related processes involved in the surface layer heat balance in the western equatorial Pacific warm pool.

Acknowledgments. This research was supported by NOAA's Office of Global Programs and by a UCAR Visiting Scientist Programs' NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral award to M. Cronin. We would like to thank H. P. Freitag for his assistance in processing the data, and the TAO operational group for their dedicated work in obtaining high-quality routine measurements. Special thanks go to the chief scientist, Thierry Delcroix of ORSTOM, Noumea, and the crew of the R/V Le Noroit, who rescued the errant 0°, 156°E PROTEUS buoy on Christmas Eve, 1992. Additionally we would like to thank D. E. Harrison, several members of the COARE air-sea flux group (D. Rogers, O. Tsukamoto, S. Anderson, F. Bradley, C. Fairall, B. Weller), and the COARE heat budget subgroup (B. Smyth, D. Siegel, C. Ohlmann, H. Wijesekera, E. Antonissen, S. Godfrey) for particularly helpful discussions of this work. This is PMEL contribution 1713.


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