Sensitivity of Pacific Ocean Tropical Instability Waves to Initial Conditions

Tropical instability waves (TIWs) appear as monthly oscillations of the currents, sea level, and sea surface temperature of the eastern equatorial Pacific. They are understood as unstable waves feeding on the kinetic and potential energy of the mean currents. A general circulation model is shown to reproduce the main features associated with TIWs. It is then used to investigate the dynamical regime of TIWs, by assessing their sensitivity to oceanic initial conditions. Locally in space and time, small perturbations can grow enough to modify significantly the phase of the TIW field, suggesting some chaotic behavior. When considered over the whole active TIW region, however, the phases of the perturbed and unperturbed experiments remain in agreement. This suggests that TIW activity in this model is more consistent with a limit cycle behavior than with fully developed turbulence and that irregular behavior of TIWs mostly stems from external forcing by the wind. A stronger result is that TIWs in experiments starting from very different initial conditions come back into phase after a few years. This is consistent with the suggestion that TIWs might be phase-locked to the wind forcing. Quiescent periods of the TIW's cycle play an important role in the decay of TIW's phase disagreement but cannot explain the phase-locking mechanism entirely. The implications of these results and their sensitivity to the forcing are discussed.