Two Regimes of the Equatorial Warm Pool. Part II: Hybrid Coupled GCM Experiments

Abstract

Abstract In this second of a two-part study, the two regimes in a simple tropical climate model identified in Part I are verified using a hybrid coupled general circulation model (HCM) that can reproduce the observed climatology and the interannual variability reasonably well. Defining a ratio of basin width between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a series of parameter sweep experiments was conducted with idealized tropical land geometry. Consistent with the simple model, the HCM simulates two distinct states: the split warm pool regime with large vacillation between the two ocean basins and the single warm pool regime representing current climate. The former is suddenly switched to the latter as the Pacific becomes wider than the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, the vacillation in the split regime reveals a preferred transition route that the warm phase in the Pacific follows that in the Indian Ocean. This route occurs due to convectively coupled Kelvin waves that accompany precipitation anomalies over land. Additional experiments show that the inclusion of the idealized Eurasian continent stabilizes the split regime by reducing the Bjerknes feedback in the Indian Ocean, suggesting the atmosphere–ocean–land interaction at work in maintaining the observed warm pool. No difference in cloud feedback was found between two regimes; this feature may, however, be model dependent. Both the simple model and the HCM results suggest that the tropical atmosphere–ocean system inherently involves multiple solutions, which may have an implication on climate modeling as well as on the understanding of the observed mean climate.