Abstract
Argo observations revealed dramatic sea surface salinity (SSS) changes in the northeastern tropical Pacific Ocean (NETPO) during the past one and half decades, with a steady increase during 2004–2012 and a sharp decrease during 2013–2016. These changes mainly result from anomalous precipitation associated with the Walker Circulation through moisture transport across Central America. The anomalous Walker Circulation is caused by changes in trans-basin sea surface temperature (SST) gradients, especially those in the eastern tropical Pacific. Results using a longer reanalysis indicate that the upward trend of SSS in the NETPO started from the mid-1990s as the moisture transport across Central America decreased in response to reduced trans-basin SST gradients associated with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41830538, 41976024, 42006028), the Strategic Priority Program on Space Science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA15020901), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (133244KYSB20190031, ISEE2018PY06), and the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (GML2019ZD0303, 2019BT02H594). J. Chi is also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42006028) and the Open Fund of the Key Laboratory of Ocean Circulation and Waves (KLOCW2004). We used surface current products collected from OSCAR (http://www.oscar.noaa.gov), the evaporation product of the WHOI OAFlux project (http://oaflux.whoi.edu), TRMM precipitation data of NASA (https://pmm.nasa.gov/data-access/downloads/TRMM), ERA5 product of ECMWF (https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5), Argo data collected by the International Argo Project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/), and TAO/TRITON data from the GTMBA Project Office of NOAA/PMEL (https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/drupal/disdel/). We acknowledge the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, for providing the monthly NCEP reanalysis, GPCP, OISST, and OLR data at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/. We thank the Met Office Hadley Centre for providing the EN4.2.1 data at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/en4/.
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Zheng, Y., Du, Y., Chi, J. et al. Rapid changes in northeastern tropical Pacific Ocean surface salinity due to trans-basin moisture transport in recent decades. Clim Dyn 56, 2245–2257 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05585-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05585-9