Abstract
<p>The tropics are characterized by a variety of atmospheric and oceanic systems dominated by multi-scale interaction processes. This is Part I of a two-part review study on climate and climate variability of the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). Here, the mean fields of incoming short wave radiation, surface energy fluxes, sea surface temperature, sea level pressure, salinity, wind patterns at 10m height, wind stress curl, precipitation, and evaporation are analyzed and synthetized using available data including that from the last decade. Given the strong interaction between the ETP and Caribbean Sea-Atlantic Ocean, mean field discussions are presented for two different domains, a relatively large domain from 24° S - 36° N and between 129° W - 17° W, and a smaller domain embedding only the Caribbean Sea and the easternmost part of the ETP. Most results on the climate of these two regions can be used as the base line for climate change studies. Interannual variability of tropical cyclones is also investigated over the domain of the latter two basins in the smaller domain. The study is complemented with a short review of some low frequency modes, such as, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation. Such low-frequency modes are known to modulate regional systems, including tropical cyclone frequency.</p><div> </div>
Highlights
The present work (Part I of the study, and a companion work, Part II), aim at extending the contribution of Amador et al (2006), by using new atmospheric and oceanic information for a longer period of observations with higher quality controlled climatic data
The first area selected for the spatial plots of the atmospheric and oceanic variables used in this work is, for convenience of comparison, an extension of the Central America domain as defined in the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) framework
Objectively Analyzed Air-sea Fluxes (OAFlux) estimates are based on surface meteorological fields derived from satellite remote sensing (e.g., Special Sensor Microwave Imager, SSM/I), column water vapor retrievals and reanalysis outputs produced from National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) models using a Center for Oceanic Awareness Research & Education (COARE) bulk algorithm
Summary
The first area selected for the spatial plots of the atmospheric and oceanic variables used in this work is, for convenience of comparison, an extension of the Central America domain as defined in the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) framework (http://wcrp-cordex.ipsl.jussieu.fr/). When information and resolution allow, patterns of atmospheric and ocean variables are shown for the smaller area 0o-20° N - 65o-95° W. Precipitation from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) version 7 (3B42, Huffman et al, 2007) was used Other data sets such as the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) Version-2 (Adler et al, 2003) do not have the required resolution for detailed analysis as needed here. Satellite wind data from the Cross-Calibrated Multi-Platform (CCMP) Ocean Surface Vector Analysis, were used to generate seasonal wind patterns in the tropical Americas. This dataset provides long time series of ocean surface analysis, starting in July 1987 and ending in 2011. The multivariate ENSO index (MEI) (Wolter, & Timlin, 1998), as well as the PDO index (Mantua, Hare, Zhang, Wallace, & Francis, 1997) and the AMO index (Enfield, Mestas-Núñez, & Trimble, 2001) were used to analyze the low frequency variability of tropical cyclone activity in the above two oceanic regions
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