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Observed year-to-year sea surface salinity variability in the Bay of Bengal during the 2009–2014 period

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An Erratum to this article was published on 08 February 2015

Abstract

The present study describes the observed sea surface salinity (SSS) interannual variability in the Bay of Bengal over the 2009–2014 period. It is based on an original compilation of all available in situ SSS observations in that region, assembled in a 2°-resolution trimonthly gridded field. We find that year-to-year SSS variability is particularly strong in the north-eastern part of the bay. Over recent years, this variability takes the form of two successive and opposite phases: a saltening phase from mid-2009 to late 2010, immediately followed by a freshening phase from late 2010 to late 2011. The typical magnitude of each anomalous spell is about one in the practical salinity scale, making this area one of the most variable of the tropical oceans at interannual timescales. A simple mixed-layer salt budget indicates that year-to-year large-scale SSS variability in the Northern Bay of Bengal is primarily driven by freshwater flux variability with a correlation of 0.68, with rather independent contributions from precipitation and river run-off. The oceanic surface circulation variability contributes less systematically to the large-scale SSS evolution in the Northern Bay of Bengal over the entire record with a correlation of 0.13, despite a strong contribution at times, in particular, during the 2011 positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) freshening.

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Notes

  1. Salinity is expressed in the Practical Salinity Scale throughout this paper, i.e. in grams of salt per kilogram of seawater, hence without units.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on our paper. XCTD and bucket salinity observations are supported by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, through the Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad, India. We thank the numerous people who spent a long time at sea collecting the salinity observations. Thermosalinograph data were collected and processed by the French SSS Observation Service (www.legos.obs-mip.fr/observations/sss). We sincerely thank the team efforts of NIOT technical and scientific staff for providing continuous data from the OMNI moorings. We are thankful to Argo and RAMA programmes for making their salinity data available to all. FD, FP, ML and JV are funded by Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). Part of this work was done when CAVS and FD visited the Indo-French Cell for Water Sciences (Joint International Laboratory IRD-IISc, Bangalore, India). Support from this laboratory is gratefully acknowledged. We acknowledge constructive comments by Debasis Sengupta. This is CSIR-NIO contribution No. 5689

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIR/National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, India

    Akurathi Venkata Sai Chaitanya, Fabien Durand, Vissa Venkata Gopalakrishna & Chanda Kranthikumar

  2. IRD/Laboratoire d’études en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales (LEGOS), Toulouse, France

    Fabien Durand & Fabrice Papa

  3. Indo-French Cell for Water Sciences, IISc-NIO-IITM–IRD Joint International Laboratory, IISc, Bangalore, India

    Fabrice Papa

  4. National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai, India

    Simi Mathew & R. Venkatesan

  5. Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR 7159, LOCEAN, Paris, 75005, France

    Matthieu Lengaigne & Jerome Vialard

  6. Indo-French Cell for Water Sciences, National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula, India

    Matthieu Lengaigne

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  1. Akurathi Venkata Sai Chaitanya
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  2. Fabien Durand
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Correspondence to Fabien Durand.

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Chaitanya, A.V.S., Durand, F., Mathew, S. et al. Observed year-to-year sea surface salinity variability in the Bay of Bengal during the 2009–2014 period. Ocean Dynamics 65, 173–186 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-014-0802-x

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