Ocean, sea-ice, atmosphere oscillations in the Southern Ocean as simulated by the SINTEX coupled model

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Carril AF, Navarra A, Masina S
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: SINTEX; Climate Modeling; Antarc*; Antarctic; Sea ice; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11585/896606; https://doi.org/10.1029/2004GL019623

This study evaluates the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave (ACW) as simulated by the SINTEX coupled model. We found evidence that sea-ice treatment plays a crucial role on simulating the ACW. In particular, SST anomalies at interannual time scales describe a propagating ACW-like pattern when a dynamic thermodynamic sea-ice model is coupled with the ocean, but when sea-ice is relaxed to climatology, anomalies occur as zonally symmetric patterns that do not propagate in longitude. Moreover, from the experiment with an active sea-ice component we saw that ACW-like oscillations are strongly modulated by low frequency variability. Our result adds some extra confidence to previous studies based on relatively short series of observed data.