Abstract
Long-term variability of sea surface temperature (SST) in the Taiwan Strait was studied from the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre climatological data set HadISST1. In 1957–2011, three epochs were identified. The first epoch of cooling SST lasted through 1976. The regime shift of 1976–1977 led to an extremely rapid warming of 2.1 °C in 22 years. Another regime shift occurred in 1998–1999, resulting in a 1.0 °C cooling by 2011. The cross-frontal gradient between the China Coastal Current and offshore Taiwan Strait waters has abruptly decreased in 1992 and remained low through 2011. The long-term warming of SST increased towards the East China Sea, where the SST warming in 1957–2011 was about three times that in the South China Sea. The long-term warming was strongly enhanced in winter, with the maximum warming of 3.8 °C in February. The wintertime amplification of long-term warming has resulted in a decrease of the north–south SST range from 5 to 4 °C and a decrease in the amplitude of seasonal cycle of SST from 11 to 8 °C.
Highlights
The Taiwan Strait is one of the world’s most important passages
The north–south sea surface temperature (SST) gradient along the Strait decreased from 5 °C in 1957 to 4 °C in 2011 as the colder northern Strait warmed much more than the warmer southern Strait (Fig. 2, bottom)( see Lima and Wethey 2012; Baumann and Doherty 2013)
Studies based on People’s Republic of China (PRC) data are especially valuable because PRC data from East China Sea (ECS) and Taiwan Strait are virtually absent in the World Ocean Database (WOD) maintained by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC/NOAA)
Summary
The Taiwan Strait is one of the world’s most important passages. It connects two major marginal seas, the East China Sea (ECS) and South China Sea (SCS) (Fig. 1, top). It’s a migration route for many fish species (Chang et al 2013). It’s one of the busiest sea lanes, with 58,279 cargo vessels crossing the Strait in 2012 (MOTS 2013), and home to captive marine fishing grounds and mariculture. 164 million people live on the shores of the Strait, including most of Taiwan’s 23 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan), and the entire Guangdong (104 million) and Fujian (37 million) provinces in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_population). Very few studies focused on the maritime climate of the Taiwan Strait (Kuo and Ho 2004; Kuo and Lee 2013; Oey et al 2013)
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