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Tidal mixing in the Indonesian Seas and its effect on the tropical climate system

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Abstract

The sensitivity of the tropical climate to tidal mixing in the Indonesian Archipelago (IA) is investigated using a coupled general circulation model. It is shown that the introduction of tidal mixing considerably improves water masses properties in the IA, generating fresh and cold anomalies in the thermocline and salty and cold anomalies at the surface. The subsurface fresh anomalies are advected in the Indian Ocean thermocline and ultimately surface to freshen the western part of the basin whereas surface salty anomalies are advected in the Leuwin current to salt waters along the Australian coast. The ~0.5°C surface cooling in the IA reduces by 20% the overlying deep convection. This improves both the amount and structure of the rainfall and weakens the wind convergence over the IA, relaxes the equatorial Pacific trade winds and strengthens the winds along Java coast. These wind changes causes the thermocline to be deeper in the eastern equatorial Pacific and shallower in the eastern Indian Ocean. The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) amplitude is therefore slightly reduced while the Indian Ocean Dipole/Zonal Mode (IODZM) variability increases. IODZM precursors, related to ENSO events the preceding winter in this model, are also shown to be more efficient in promoting an IODZM thanks to an enhanced wind/thermocline coupling. Changes in the coupled system in response tidal mixing are as large as those found when closing the Indonesian Throughflow, emphasizing the key role of IA on the Indo-Pacific climate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Océanographie et du Climat: Expérimentation et Approches Numériques (CNRS/IRD/UPMC/MNHN), case 100, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, boite 100, 4 place Jussieu, 75252, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Ariane Koch-Larrouy, Matthieu Lengaigne, Pascal Terray, Gurvan Madec & Sebastien Masson

  2. National Oceanographic, Centre, Southampton, UK

    Gurvan Madec

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  1. Ariane Koch-Larrouy
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  2. Matthieu Lengaigne
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  3. Pascal Terray
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  4. Gurvan Madec
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  5. Sebastien Masson
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Correspondence to Ariane Koch-Larrouy.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 SINTEX F1 coupled model

The other model used in this paper is an upgraded version of SINTEX-F1 ocean atmosphere coupled model (Luo et al. 2003, 2007). This new version has been developed in a frame of EU-Japan collaborations between LOCEAN, MPImet and FRCGC. Its oceanic component is NEMO (http://www.locean-ipsl.upmc.fr/NEMO) with OPA9.2 (Madec 2008; Madec et al. 1998) for the oceanic dynamical core and LIM2 (Timmermann et al. 2005) for sea–ice model. We use the configuration known as “ORCA05” which is a tri-polar global grid with a resolution of 0.5°′ 0.5°cos (latitude). Vertical resolution and mixing are similar to OPA8.2. The atmospheric component is ECHAM5.2 (Roeckner et al. 2003, 2004) with a T106 horizontal resolution and 31 hybrid sigma-pressure levels. A mass flux scheme (Tiedtke 1989) is applied for cumulus convection with modifications for penetrative convection according to Nordeng 1994. The coupling information, without flux correction, is exchanged every two hours by means of the OASIS 3 coupler (Valcke 2006). This higher resolution coupled SINTEX model has been run for 50 years only, due to computational expense.

The surface response to tidal mixing in the SINTEX model is comparable in structure and amplitude to the one found in HadOPA (Fig. 9; Table 2). Locally, the SST and precipitations display the same response in amplitude (−0.5°C, −1.5 mm/day) in better agreement with observations (Table 3). The wind convergence decreasing and the thermocline flattening are comparable in both models. The main differences concern SSS anomaly amplitude. Indeed the structures are similar in both models but the amplitude both local and remote are smaller for the SINTEX model. This presumably due to the subsurface salinity maximum less intense than for the HadOPA model, which bring less salty water in the surface and a smaller anomaly in the subsurface (not shown).

Fig. 9
figure 9

SST top, rain middle, SSS bottom anomalies between S-Ti and S-noTi experiments. The black box shows the Indonesian domain over which averages are computed in Table 2

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Koch-Larrouy, A., Lengaigne, M., Terray, P. et al. Tidal mixing in the Indonesian Seas and its effect on the tropical climate system. Clim Dyn 34, 891–904 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-009-0642-4

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