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1. Atlantic‐Origin Cold Saline Water Intrusion and Shoaling of the Nutricline in the Pacific Arctic

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090907  

   Jung, Jinyoung; Cho, Kyoung‐Ho; Park, Taewook; Yoshizawa, Eri; Lee, Youngju; Yang, Eun Jin; Gal, Jong‐Ku; Ha, Sun‐Yong; Kim, Soobin; Kang, Sung‐Ho; et al (March 2021, Geophysical Research Letters)

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2. Disentangling the North Pacific Meridional Mode from tropical Pacific variability

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-022-00317-8  

   Richter, Ingo; Stuecker, Malte F.; Takahashi, Naoya; Schneider, Niklas (November 2022, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science)

   Abstract Variations of sea-surface temperature (SST) in the subtropical North Pacific have received considerable attention due to their potential role as a precursor of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in the tropical Pacific as well as their role in regional climate impacts. These subtropical SST variations, known as the North Pacific Meridional Mode (PMM), are thought to be triggered by extratropical atmospheric forcing and amplified by air-sea coupling involving surface winds, evaporation, and SST. The PMM is often defined through a statistical technique called maximum covariance analysis (MCA) that identifies patterns of maximum covariability between SST and surface winds. Here we show that SST alone is sufficient to reproduce the MCA-based PMM index with near-perfect correlation. This dominance of the SST suggests that the MCA-based definition of the PMM may not be ideally suited for capturing two-way wind-SST interaction or, alternatively, that this interaction is relatively weak. We further show that the MCA-based PMM definition conflates intrinsic subtropical and remote ENSO variability, thereby undermining its interpretation as an ENSO precursor. Our findings indicate that, while air-sea coupling may be important for variability in the subtropical North Pacific, it cannot be reliably identified by the MCA-based definition of the PMM. This highlights the need for refined tools to diagnose variability in the subtropical North Pacific. 

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3. Synchronous decadal climate variability in the tropical Central Pacific and tropical South Atlantic

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-024-00806-y  

   Liu, Chao; An, Soon-Il; Kim, Soong-Ki; Stuecker, Malte F; Zhang, Wenjun; Jin, Fei-Fei; Park, Jae-Heung; Jiang, Leishan; Xue, Aoyun; Geng, Xin; et al (December 2024, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science)
4. Microbial community structure in the western tropical South Pacific

   https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-3909-2018  

   Bock, Nicholas; Van Wambeke, France; Dion, Moïra; Duhamel, Solange (January 2018, Biogeosciences)

   Abstract. Oligotrophic regions play a central role in global biogeochemical cycles, with microbial communities in these areas representing an important term in global carbon budgets. While the general structure of microbial communities has been well documented in the global ocean, some remote regions such as the western tropical South Pacific (WTSP) remain fundamentally unexplored. Moreover, the biotic and abiotic factors constraining microbial abundances and distribution remain not well resolved. In this study, we quantified the spatial (vertical and horizontal) distribution of major microbial plankton groups along a transect through the WTSP during the austral summer of 2015, capturing important autotrophic and heterotrophic assemblages including cytometrically determined abundances of non-pigmented protists (also called flagellates). Using environmental parameters (e.g., nutrients and light availability) as well as statistical analyses, we estimated the role of bottom–up and top–down controls in constraining the structure of the WTSP microbial communities in biogeochemically distinct regions. At the most general level, we found a typical tropical structure, characterized by a shallow mixed layer, a clear deep chlorophyll maximum at all sampling sites, and a deep nitracline. Prochlorococcus was especially abundant along the transect, accounting for 68±10.6% of depth-integrated phytoplankton biomass. Despite their relatively low abundances, picophytoeukaryotes (PPE) accounted for up to 26±11.6% of depth-integrated phytoplankton biomass, while Synechococcus accounted for only 6±6.9%. Our results show that the microbial community structure of the WTSP is typical of highly stratified regions, and underline the significant contribution to total biomass by PPE populations. Strong relationships between N₂ fixation rates and plankton abundances demonstrate the central role of N₂ fixation in regulating ecosystem processes in the WTSP, while comparative analyses of abundance data suggest microbial community structure to be increasingly regulated by bottom–up processes under nutrient limitation, possibly in response to shifts in abundances of high nucleic acid bacteria (HNA). 

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5. Controls on the Cadmium-Phosphate Relationship in the Tropical South Pacific: Dissolved Cd in South Pacific

   https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GB005556  

   Roshan, Saeed; Wu, Jingfeng; DeVries, Timothy (October 2017, Global Biogeochemical Cycles)