TY - JOUR
T1 - Regional variations in the ocean response to tropical cyclones
T2 - Ocean mixing versus low cloud suppression
AU - Huang, Andrew
AU - Li, Hui
AU - Sriver, Ryan L.
AU - Fedorov, Alexey V.
AU - Brierley, Chris M.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank Kerry Emanuel for constructive comments and feedback on early versions of the manuscript. A.V.F. acknowledges grant support from NSF (AGS-1405272) and NOAA (NA14OAR4310277). R.L.S. and H.L. acknowledge support from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). This research is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications. TMI data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems and sponsored by the NASA Earth Sciences Program. Data are available at www.remss.com. Cloud and radiation data: CERES data were obtained from the Atmospheric Science Data Center at the NASA Langley Research Center. Gridded Argo data were developed at the Laboratorie de Physique des Oceans and distributed by the Coriolis In Situ Service for Operational Oceanography. We also thank Kerry Emanuel for providing global TC best track data: http://eaps4.mit.edu/faculty/Emanuel/products.
PY - 2017/2/28
Y1 - 2017/2/28
N2 - Tropical cyclones (TCs) tend to cool sea surface temperature (SST) via enhanced vertical mixing and evaporative fluxes. This cooling is substantially reduced in the subtropics, especially in the northeastern Pacific where the occurrence of TCs can warm the ocean surface. Here we investigate the cause of this anomalous warming by analyzing the local oceanic features and TC-induced anomalies of SST, surface fluxes, and cloud fraction using satellite and in situ data. We find that TCs tend to suppress low clouds at the margins of the tropical ocean warm pool, enhancing shortwave radiative surface fluxes within the first week following storm passage, which, combined with spatial variations in ocean thermal structure, can produce a ~1°C near-surface warming in the northeastern Pacific. These findings, supported by high-resolution Earth system model simulations, point to potential connections between TCs, ocean temperature, and low cloud distributions that can influence tropical surface heat budgets.
AB - Tropical cyclones (TCs) tend to cool sea surface temperature (SST) via enhanced vertical mixing and evaporative fluxes. This cooling is substantially reduced in the subtropics, especially in the northeastern Pacific where the occurrence of TCs can warm the ocean surface. Here we investigate the cause of this anomalous warming by analyzing the local oceanic features and TC-induced anomalies of SST, surface fluxes, and cloud fraction using satellite and in situ data. We find that TCs tend to suppress low clouds at the margins of the tropical ocean warm pool, enhancing shortwave radiative surface fluxes within the first week following storm passage, which, combined with spatial variations in ocean thermal structure, can produce a ~1°C near-surface warming in the northeastern Pacific. These findings, supported by high-resolution Earth system model simulations, point to potential connections between TCs, ocean temperature, and low cloud distributions that can influence tropical surface heat budgets.
KW - Earth system model
KW - Ocean-atmosphere interactions
KW - tropical climate
KW - tropical cyclones
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U2 - 10.1002/2016GL072023
DO - 10.1002/2016GL072023
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85013629656
VL - 44
SP - 1947
EP - 1955
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
SN - 0094-8276
IS - 4
ER -