The Mediterranean basin is as a strongly cyclogenetic area. Most of the cyclonic events arise from the interplay between the thermal structure of the Mediterranean sea and the orographic structure surrounding it. In many cases, the dynamics of deeply convective cyclones are strongly determined by latent and sensible heat fluxes that, over the sea, are driven by the Sea Surface Temperature (SST)...

[1] A linear, zonally averaged model of the interaction between the tropical Atlantic (TA) atmosphere and ocean is presented. A balance between evaporation and meridional heat advection in the mixed layer determines the sea surface temperature tendency. The atmosphere is a fixeddepth, sub-cloud layer in which the specific humidity anomaly is determined by a steady-state balance between evaporat...

Tropical instability waves (TIWs) are detected in remotely-sensed sea surface height (SSH), temperature (SST), and wind records of the eastern equatorial Pacific. Analyses of TIW anomaly relationships reveal strong dynamical influence of TIWs within approximately 5 of the equator. The first influence is advective heat flux. The primary forcing of TIW SST anomalies is advection of the meridional...

Recent research indicates that the cooling trend in the tropical Pacific Ocean over the past 15 years underlies the contemporaneous hiatus in global mean temperature increase. During the hiatus, the tropical Pacific Ocean displays a La Niña-like cooling pattern while sea surface temperature (SST) in the Indian Ocean has continued to increase. This SST pattern differs from the well-known La Niña...

[1] This study presents a comparison of sea surface temperature (SST) estimates based on Mg/Ca ratios of Globigerinoides ruber and alkenone unsaturation index (U37 K0) in core sediment recovered from the Gulf of Guinea, eastern equatorial Atlantic. Mg/Caand U37 K0-based SST estimates yield fairly comparable results for the time interval 21,000–14,500 years and for the late Holocene. The early a...

Lagged maximum covariance analysis (LMCA) is used to examine the intraseasonal variability of zonal wind, sea surface temperature (SST), and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) in the northeastern tropical Pacific Ocean during Northern Hemisphere summertime. The analysis shows a strong temporal asymmetry in that wind and convection anomalies lead to SST anomalies, but SST anomalies are not follow...

[1] We use elemental ratio (Mg/Ca, Sr/Ca, U/Ca and Ba/Ca) and oxygen isotope data from a Porites lutea coral head collected from offshore Amédée Island, New Caledonia (22 290S, 166 280E) to assess the degree to which changes in these geochemical variables reflect variations in sea surface conditions. We have assessed the robustness of each geochemical proxy by comparing 25 years (1992–1968) of ...

Many general circulation models (GCMs) share similar biases in the representation of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) in the Atlantic, even when they are forced with the time series of the observed sea surface temperature (SST). Specifically, they overestimate precipitation in the Southern Hemisphere in boreal spring and in the Caribbean region in boreal summer. The majority of the mod...

During El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, atmospheric teleconnections associated with sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the equatorial Pacific can influence the ocean thousands of kilometers away. We use several data sets to delineate this “atmospheric bridge” between ocean basins, focusing on two emerging research areas: 1) the evolution of atmosphere-ocean interactions in th...

A sea surface temperature (SST) record based on planktonic foraminiferal magnesium/calcium ratios from a site in the western equatorial Pacific warm pool reveals that glacial-interglacial oscillations in SST shifted from a period of 41,000 to 100,000 years at the mid-Pleistocene transition, 950,000 years before the present. SST changes at both periodicities were synchronous with eastern Pacific...