Daohua Bi

Fate of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: Strong decline under continued warming and Greenland melting

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NA15OAR4310239]; Netherlands Earth System Science Center (NESSC); Polar Program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO); Regional and Global Climate Modelling Program (RGCM) of the U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science (BER) [DE-FC02-97ER62402]; Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy; ArCS; ICA-RUS; Natural Environment Research Council

Robust contribution of decadal anomalies to the frequency of central-Pacific El Niño

During year-to-year El Niño events in recent decades, major sea surface warming has occurred frequently in the central Pacific. This is distinct from the eastern Pacific warming pattern during canonical El Niño events. Accordingly, the central-Pacific El Niño exerts distinct impacts on ecosystems, climate and hurricanes worldwide. The increased frequency of the new type of El Niño presents a challenge not only for the understanding of El Niño dynamics and its change but also for the prediction of El Niño and its global impacts at present and future climate. Previous studies have proposed different indices to represent the two types of El Niño for better understanding, prediction and impact assessment. Here, we find that all popularly used indices for the central-Pacific El Niño show a dominant spectral peak at a decadal period with comparatively weak variance at interannual timescales. Our results suggest that decadal anomalies have an important contribution to the occurrence of the central-Pacific El Niño over past decades. Removing the decadal component leads to a significant reduction in the frequency of the central-Pacific El Niño in observations and in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 simulations of preindustrial, historical and future climate.

Multi-decadal variations of the South Indian Ocean subsurface temperature influenced by Pacific Decadal Oscillation

Abstract Over recent decades, a strong subsurface cooling trend in the South Indian Ocean (SIO) occurred, despite a continuous sea surface warming. Previous studies suggest this long-term (around 1960–2000) cooling trend is mainly driven by remote Pacific atmospheric forcing or local Indian Ocean (IO) forcing. This study reveals that the dominant driver of the SIO subsurface cooling trend in different periods is closely related to the phase of Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Our results suggest that the local IO wind forcing is responsible for the majority of the subsurface cooling trend and overwhelms a weak warming trend induced by the remote tropical Pacific wind forcing during the negative-phase period of PDO during 1960–76. However, this situation reverses during the PDO positive-phase period during 1977–98. Our analysis suggests that the PDO strengthens/weakens the tropical Pacific trade winds during negative/positive phase periods. Furthermore, the multi-decadal variations in the western Pacific induced by PDO impact the SIO subsurface temperature via baroclinic Rossby waves.

Improved air–sea flux algorithms in an ocean–atmosphere coupled model for simulation of global ocean SST and its tropical Pacific variability

A revised algorithm for air–sea exchange parameterization of momentum, sensible and latent heat flux improves the climate simulation of the global distribution of sea surface temperature (SST) and tropical Pacific variability of SST. Based upon an analysis of studies from field programs, we apply the revised algorithm with new expressions for surface momentum and scalar roughness length dependent on 10-m winds in neutralxa0condition, and evaluate them in the ocean–atmosphere coupled model of the Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator. The revised algorithm improves simulations for mean global SST distribution, demonstrated with Pearson’s correlation indices showing corrections to a net fraction of 28xa0% over the global oceans. Being focused on the tropical Pacific, the algorithm eases the tropical SST cold tongue bias, and improves predictability of ENSO variability with better representations of the standard deviation of the Nino-3.4 index, especially the skewness of the index for nonlinearity of ENSO variability. Bjerknes and thermodynamical feedbacks are applied to understand the effects of the revised algorithm on the predictability of the Nino indices.