[1] A Porites coral from New Ireland (2.5 S, 150.5 E), at the heart of the Pacific warm pool, records variations of Ba/Ca back to the early 1820s. The New Ireland Coastal Undercurrent, which flows along the north coast and transports high-nutrient thermocline waters, is thought to be the main source of the Ba enrichment observed in the coral during El Niño. Between the 1850s and the 1960s, freq...

Although the mechanisms remain unknown, maternal core temperature (Tc) decreases near term of pregnancy and is increased throughout lactation in rats. The purpose of our present experiments was to determine whether pregnancy and lactation shift the thermoneutral zone of rats and to investigate whether the changes in maternal Tc during pregnancy and lactation result from "forced" or "regulated" ...

The response of a thermocline gyre to anomalies in surface wind stress forcing and surface buoyancy forcing is investigated in light of planetary wave dynamics, both analytically and numerically. The author’s theory suggests that anomalous Ekman pumping most efficiently generates the non-Doppler-shift mode, which resembles the first baroclinic mode and has the clearest signal in the sea surface...

Comparisons between isothermal depth to the top of the thermocline, and the mixed layer depth based on a ot criterion were undertaken for the tropical world oceans. In three equatorial regions, a shallower mixed layer than isothermal layer occurs, implying the presence of a strong halocline above the thermocline. This distance separating the top of the thermocline and the bottom of the mixed la...

The peaks of El Niño in the Cane–Zebiak (CZ) model tend to appear most frequently around November when the ocean Rossby waves, which were amplified during the previous unstable season (February–May), turn back to the eastern Pacific and when the local instability in the eastern Pacific is very weak. The peaks of La Niña in the CZ model occur most frequently in boreal summer, in contrast to the ...

Please cite this article in press as: Ferrari, R j.ocemod.2011.02.013 The ocean contributes to regulating the Earth’s climate through its ability to transport heat from the equator to the poles. In this study we use long simulations of an ocean model to investigate whether the heat transport is carried primarily by wind-driven gyres or whether it is dominated by deep circulations associated wit...

Numerical experiments with a coupled model have been carried out to test the heat-pump hypothesis for ENSO. The hypothesis states that the level of ENSO activity is controlled by the meridional differential surface heating over the Pacific: either an enhanced surface heating over the equatorial region or an enhanced cooling over the subtropical/extratropical ocean may result in a regime with st...

This study utilizes field observations in southern Monterey Bay, CA, to examine how regionalscale upwelling and changing offshore (shelf) conditions influence nearshore internal bores. We show that the low-frequency wind forcing (e.g., upwelling/relaxation time scales) modifies the offshore stratification and thermocline depth. This in turn alters the strength and structure of observed internal...

[1] Eastern Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) and mean equatorial Pacific thermocline depth are key variables in El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). A linear fit to observations leads to a remarkably simple picture: ENSO can be represented by a classical damped oscillator, with SST and thermocline depth playing the roles of momentum and position, respectively. An independent fit of observe...