Simulation of ENSO with a Global Atmospheric GCM Coupled to a High-Resolution, Tropical Pacific Ocean GCM

A global atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) coupled to an oceanic GCM that is dynamically active only in the tropical Pacific simulates variability over a broad spectrum of frequencies even though the forcing, the annual mean incoming solar radiation, is steady. Of special interest is the simulation of a realistically irregular Southern Oscillation between warm El Niño and cold La Niña states. Its time scale is on the order of 5 years. The spatial structure is strikingly different in the eastern and western halves of the ocean basin. Sea surface temperature changes have their largest amplitude in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, but the low-frequency zonal wind fluctuations are displaced westward and are large over the western half of the basin. These zonal wind anomalies are essentially confined to the band of latitudes 10° to 10°S so that they form a jet and have considerable latitudinal shear. During El Niño the associated curl contributes to a pair of pronounced minima in thermocline depth, symmetrically about the equator in the west, near 8°N and 8°S. In the east, where the low-frequency wind forcing is at a minimum, the deepening of the thermocline in response to the winds in the west has a very different shape—an approximate Gaussian shape centered on the equator. The low-frequency sea surface temperature and zonal wind anomalies wax and wane practically in place and in phase without significant zonal phase propagation. Thermocline depth variations have phase propagation; it is eastward at a speed near 15 cm s−1 along the equator in the western half of the basin and is westward off the equator. This phase propagation, a property of the oceanic response to the quasi-periodic winds that force currents and excite a host of waves with periods near 5 years, indicates that the ocean is not in equilibrium with the forcing. In other words, the ocean-atmosphere interactions that cause El Niño to develop at a certain time are countered and, in due course, reversed by the delayed response of the ocean to earlier winds. This “delayed oscillator” mechanism that sustains interannual oscillations in the model differ in its details from that prevoiusly discussed by Schopf and Suarez and others. The latter investigators invoke an explicit role for Kelvin and Rossby waves. These waves cannot be identified in the low-frequency fluctuations of this model, but they are energetic at relatively short periods and are of vital importance to a quasi-resonant oceanic mode with a period near 7 months that is excited in the model. The similarities and differences between the results of this simulation and those with other models, especially the one described in a companion paper, are discussed.