During the warm early Pliocene (approximately 4.5 to 3.0 million years ago), the most recent interval with a climate warmer than today, the eastern Pacific thermocline was deep and the average west-to-east sea surface temperature difference across the equatorial Pacific was only 1.5 +/- 0.9 degrees C, much like it is during a modern El Niño event. Thus, the modern strong sea surface temperature...

A coupled theory is proposed to account for the magnitude of the Walker circulation in the tropical Pacific. It is suggested that the Pacific Walker circulation is at a saturation state, at which the zonal sea surface temperature difference is bounded by about a quarter of the latitudinal difference of the radiative–convective equilibrium sea surface temperature. Corresponding author address: Z...

The shape diversity among populations of Scartelaos tenuis (Day 1876) from five stations (194 specimens) in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz (Qeshm Island), and the Sea of Oman were investigated. The shape variation was assessed by geometric morphometrics, using 14 morphological landmarks. The two sexes were not distinguishable by the shape. Fish samples were classified into two distinct grou...

The mean seasonal cycle of surface heat budget is examined using historical temperature data combined with climatological wind stress and surface heat flux in the South China Sea. In most parts of the basin, we see a negative correlation between sea surface temperature (SST) and mixed layer depth (MLD); that is, SST tends to be higher (lower) when MLD is shallower (deeper). Given the characteri...

Sensitivity analysis for water vapor profile estimation with Infrared: IR sounder data based on inversion is carried out. Through simulation study, it is found that influence due to ground surface relative humidity estimation error is greater than that of sea surface temperature estimation error on the water vapor vertical profile retrievals. KeywordsIR sounde; error budget analysis; MODTRAN; a...

The early-to-mid Pliocene (3–5.3 Ma) is the most recent geologic period of significant global warmth. Proxy records of Pliocene sea surface temperature (SST) indicate significant and still unexplained warm anomalies of 3∘C–9∘C in midlatitude eastern boundary currents, where present-day cool temperatures are maintained by wind-driven upwelling. Here we quantify the effect of large-scale Pliocene...

The introduction into a mesoscale model of random (in space) variations in roughness length, or random (in space and time) surface perturbations of temperature and friction velocity, produces a measurable, but barely significant, response in the simulated flow dynamics of the lower atmosphere. The perturbations are an attempt to include the effects of sub-grid variability into the ensemble-mean...

Abrupt climate change is abundant in geological records, but climate models rarely have been able to simulate such events in response to realistic forcing. Here we report on a spontaneous abrupt cooling event, lasting for more than a century, with a temperature anomaly similar to that of the Little Ice Age. The event was simulated in the preindustrial control run of a high-resolution climate mo...

[1] The substantial lowering of tropical snowlines at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), circa 21 kya, is examined using a modified version of the single-cell tropical climate model of Betts and Ridgway [1989]. These authors concluded that it was difficult to reconcile the large depression of snowlines at the LGM with the small reduction in mean tropical sea-surface temperature (SST) of the Climat...