Rapid ocean wave teleconnections linking Antarctic salinity anomalies to the equatorial ocean-atmosphere system

The coupled climate model FORTE is used to investigate rapid ocean teleconnections between the Southern Ocean and equatorial Pacific Ocean. Salinity anomalies located throughout the Southern Ocean generate barotropic signals that propagate along submerged topographic features and result in the growth of baroclinic energy anomalies around Indonesia and the tropical Pacific. Anomalies in the Ross, Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas exchange the most barotropic kinetic energy between high and low latitudes. In the equatorial Pacific, baroclinic Kelvin waves are excited which propagate eastwards along the thermocline, resulting in SST anomalies in the central and eastern Pacific. SST anomalies are subsequently amplified to magnitudes of 1.25 degrees C by air-sea interaction, which could potentially influence other coupled Pacific phenomena. Citation: Atkinson, C. P., N. C. Wells, A. T. Blaker, B. Sinha, and V. O. Ivchenko (2009), Rapid ocean wave teleconnections linking Antarctic salinity anomalies to the equatorial ocean-atmosphere system, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L08603, doi: 10.1029/2008GL036976.