Tropical Pacific Ocean Mixed Layer Heat Budget: The Pacific Cold Tongue

Abstract

Data from satellite-tracked drifting buoys and VOS/XBT profiles for the years 1979?95 were used to evaluate the seasonal cycle of how major oceanic processes redistribute heat in the cold tongue region of the tropical Pacific. The most active processes for the annual cycle are local heat storage and heat export by entrainment of upwelling and by mean meridional advection. Heat export by zonal advection, however, is not negligible, and meridional eddy heat fluxes associated with tropical instability waves effect a negative feedback that offsets a considerable fraction of that produced by the mean meridional advection. All of these processes mimic the essentially one cycle per year of the surface wind stress, as do those of the depths of both the bottom of the surface mixed layer and the thermocline. Because it is associated with poleward Ekman transports, upwelling, and baroclinic adjustment near the equator, the zonal wind stress component appears to be the more important. The meridional wind stress, while weaker in the annual mean, has a larger annual variation and, therefore, has equal influence on the annual variation of the scalar stress and perhaps the mixed layer thickness. The Monin?Obukov length is found to underestimate the mixed layer thickness considerably. Finally, the authors produce the first estimates of the seasonal cycle of eddy heat flux convergence, which plays a significant role in the evolution of the cold tongue, and show that the eddy heat flux convergence can be quantitatively modeled as eddy diffusion with a diffusivity derived from single-particle buoy statistics.