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The imprint of the ENSO activities on the South China Sea wave climate

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Abstract

Global warming is changing the global wave climate, making waves stronger. In this study, we find that the wave climate in the South China Sea (SCS) undergoes an intensifying trend under global warming background, by examining the ERA-5 wave reanalysis data over 1979–2018. Results show a significant increase in most of the SCS, of 0.2% per year in significant wave height (SWH) and 0.15% per year in wave period (WP), but there is no significant change in surface wind speed (WS), which may correspond to the weakening of the Asian monsoon. The increase of the swell is the main characteristic of wave climate change in the SCS. We further examined the possible factors to cause the increasing of SWH, and found that the frequency of gale events occurring in the SCS and its adjacent regions increased over study period. The more frequent gale events can explain the significant increasing tendency of the SWH in the SCS by causing the occurrence of swell. The increasing appearance of gale events is closely related to the intensification of El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO activities also can regulate the interannual variability of wave climate in the SCS through the surface wind. Therefore, ENSO activities play an important role in the change of wave climate in the SCS.

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Data availability

The Multivariate ENSO Index Version 2 (MEI.v2) is available from https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/. The wave buoy data are supplied by the Xisha Deep Sea Observatory, a member of the Network of Fields Observation and Research Stations of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is supported by the High Performance Computing Division and HPC managers of Wei Zhou and Dandan Sui in the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology.

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Acknowledgments

The authors appreciated the contributions of High Performance Computing Division and HPC managers of Wei Zhou and Dandan Sui in the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology.

Funding

This work was supported by the Science and Technology Basic Resources investigation Program of China (2017FY201402), the National Basic Research Program of China (41576012, 41628601). Qin-Yan Liu is supported by grant no.GML2019ZD0304 from the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou). The ERA-Interim dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography (LTO), South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China

    Xuechao Wang, Qin-Yan Liu & Dandan Sui

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xuechao Wang

  3. Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China

    Qin-Yan Liu

  4. Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory, Zhuhai, China

    Dongxiao Wang

  5. School of Marine Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Dongxiao Wang

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  1. Xuechao Wang
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  2. Qin-Yan Liu
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  3. Dandan Sui
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  4. Dongxiao Wang
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Correspondence to Qin-Yan Liu or Dongxiao Wang.

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Responsible Editor: Guoping Gao

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Wang, X., Liu, QY., Sui, D. et al. The imprint of the ENSO activities on the South China Sea wave climate. Ocean Dynamics 70, 1315–1323 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01400-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01400-5

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