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Feedbacks from tropical instability waves (TIWs) on the seasonal cycle of the eastern Pacific Ocean are studied using two eddy‐rich ocean simulations, with and without TIWs. By warming the equatorial waters by up to 0.4°C through nonlinear advection in boreal summer and fall, TIWs reduce the amplitude of the seasonal cycle in upper ocean temperatures. In addition, TIWs stabilize the upper part of the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC) through enhanced barotropic energy conversion, leading to a year‐round weakening by −0.15 m s⁻¹and preventing an unrealistic re‐intensification in boreal fall usually found in non‐eddy resolving models. A coarser simulation at 1‐degree horizontal resolution fails to reproduce the TIW‐induced nonlinear warming of equatorial waters, but succeeds in inhibiting the EUC re‐intensification. This suggests a threshold effect in TIW strength, associated with the model's ability to simulate eddies, which may be responsible for long‐standing biases displayed by global climate models in this region.

 

The contributions of different oceanic feedbacks to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phase‐locking are examined by deriving ENSO dynamics based on the recharge‐discharge framework. In observations, the significant winter preference of the ENSO peak is determined by a strong seasonal modulation of SST growth rate, which is controlled by the zonal advective and thermodynamic feedbacks. However, the majority of climate models fail to simulate ENSO phase‐locking because the contribution of zonal advective feedback to the seasonal modulation of the SST growth rate is much smaller compared to observations. The weak annual cycle of the SST‐current coupling coefficient and small annual mean of the negative climatological zonal SST gradient are two factors contributing to the weak‐biased seasonality of zonal advective feedback. Further analysis shows that the Niño3.4 SSTA has better phase‐locking performance than Niño3 SSTA in the climate models due to the better simulation of zonal advection feedback in the Niño3.4 region.

 

The Tropical North Atlantic (TNA) is characterized by significant interannual variability in sea surface temperature (SST), which is phase‐locked to the boreal spring. In this study, the phase‐locking of TNA is investigated by adopting a linear stochastic‐dynamical model (SDM) using seasonally modulated TNA feedbacks together with the seasonal modulation of ENSO forcing. In the observations, the role of local TNA feedbacks and ENSO forcing in TNA phase‐locking are equivalently important with both preferring the peak of TNA variability to appear in the boreal spring. Besides, the seasonal modulation of TNA feedbacks and ENSO forcing strength are both mainly controlled by thermodynamic processes. In most climate models, the contribution of ENSO on TNA phase‐locking is weaker than that in observations. The strength of ENSO‐related TNA phase‐locking is highly correlated with the relationship between ENSO and TNA, which is mainly determined by the amplitude of ENSO and its teleconnection patterns.

 

The temperature of the subsurface water entrained into the surface mixed layer plays a key role in controlling the sea surface temperature (SST) and its interannual variability in the equatorial Pacific. In this paper, we combine a hyperbolic tangent function bounded by the warm pool SST and centered at the thermocline depth with a variable sharpness parameter to describe the time‐space evolutions of the subsurface temperature. Under simple approximations of the sharpness parameter, this concise expression becomes remarkably efficient in capturing the observed and climate‐model simulated subsurface temperature variability in terms of anomalies of the thermocline depth and SST of the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. The formulations for the subsurface temperature and thermocline sharpness developed in this work should be useful tools for evaluating and understanding the role of the thermocline feedback in ENSO behaviors in both theoretical and comprehensive climate models.

 

Tropical instability waves (TIWs), the dominant form of eddy variability in the tropics, have a peak period at about 5 weeks and are strongly modulated by both the seasonal cycle and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In this study, we first demonstrated that TIW‐induced nonlinear dynamical heating (NDH) is basically proportional to the TIW amplitude depicted by a complex index for TIW. We further delineated that this NDH, capturing the seasonally modulated nonlinear feedback of TIW activity onto ENSO, is well approximated by a theoretical formulation derived analytically from a simple linear stochastic model for the TIW index. The results of this study may be useful for the climate community to evaluate and understand the TIW‐ENSO multiscale interaction.

 

Despite recent progress in seasonal forecast systems, the predictive skill for the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) remains typically limited to a lead time of one season or less in both dynamical and empirical models. Here we develop a simple stochastic‐dynamical model (SDM) to predict the IOD using seasonally modulated El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forcing together with a seasonally modulated Indian Ocean coupled ocean‐atmosphere feedback. The SDM, with either observed or forecasted ENSO forcing, exhibits generally higher skill and longer lead times for predicting IOD events than the operational Climate Forecast System version 2 and the Scale Interaction Experiment–Frontier system. The improvements mainly originate from better prediction of ENSO‐dependent IOD events and from reducing false alarms. These results affirm our hypothesis that operational IOD predictability beyond persistence is largely controlled by ENSO predictability and the signal‐to‐noise ratio of the system. Therefore, potential future ENSO improvements in models should translate to more skillful IOD predictions.

 

The relationship between the equatorial Pacific warm water volume (WWV) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) sea surface temperature (SST) has varied considerably on decadal timescales. These changes are strongly related to the occurrence frequency of central Pacific (CP) ENSO events. While both eastern Pacific (EP) and CP ENSO events show clear signatures of WWV recharge/discharge, their phase‐lag relationships between WWV and Niño3.4 SST are different. The WWV usually leads the Niño3.4 SST by two to three seasons during EP ENSO, while the lead time is reduced to one season during CP ENSO. The different phase‐lag relationships can be explained by distinct periodicities of the two ENSO types. Hence, ENSO regime changes associated with decadal predominance of either EP or CP ENSO events can give rise to decadal variations in the statistical WWV‐ENSO SST relationship. We emphasize the importance of identifying these different ENSO types and potentially different ENSO regimes to assess ENSO predictability.

 

Oceanic eddies accompanied by a significant vertical velocity ( w ) are known to be of great importance for the vertical transport of various climatically, biologically or biogeochemically relevant properties. Using quasi-geostrophic w -thinking to extend the classic “ β -spiral” w -theory for gyre circulations to isolated and nearly symmetric oceanic mesoscale eddies, we propose that their w motion will be dominated by a strong east-west dipole pattern with deep ocean penetrations. Contrasting numerical simulations of idealized isolated eddies together with w -equation diagnostics confirm that the w -dipole is indeed dominated by the “eddy β -spiral” mechanism in the β -plane simulation, whereas this w -dipole expectedly disappears in the f -plane simulation. Analyses of relatively isolated warm and cold eddy examples show good agreement with the proposed mechanism. Our studies further clarify eddy vertical motions, have implications for ocean mixing and vertical transport, and inspire further studies.