Understanding the Equatorial Pacific Cold Tongue Time-Mean Heat Budget. Part I: Diagnostic Framework

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The Pacific equatorial cold tongue plays a leading role in Earth’s strongest and most predictable climate signals. To illuminate the processes governing cold tongue temperatures, the upper-ocean heat budget is explored using the GFDL-FLOR coupled GCM (the forecast-oriented low ocean resolution version of CM2.5). Starting from the exact temperature budget for layers of time-varying thickness, the layer temperature tendency terms are studied using hourly-, daily-, and monthly-mean output from a 30-yr simulation driven by present-day radiative forcings. The budget is then applied to 1) a surface mixed layer whose temperature is highly correlated with SST, in which the air–sea heat flux is balanced mainly by downward diffusion of heat across the layer base, and 2) a thicker advective layer that subsumes most of the vertical mixing, in which the air–sea heat flux is balanced mainly by monthly-scale advection. The surface warming from shortwave fluxes and submonthly meridional advection and the subsurface cooling from monthly vertical advection are both shown to be essential to maintain the cold tongue thermal stratification against the destratifying effects of vertical mixing. Although layer undulations strongly mediate the tendency terms on diurnal-to-interannual scales, the 30-yr-mean tendencies are found to be well summarized by analogous budgets developed for stationary but spatially varying layers. The results are used to derive practical simplifications of the exact budget, to support the analyses in Part II of this paper, and to facilitate broader application of heat budget analyses when evaluating and comparing climate simulations.