Effects of Penetrative Radiation on the Upper Tropical Ocean Circulation

Abstract

The effects of penetrative radiation on the upper tropical ocean circulation have been investigated with an ocean general circulation model (OGCM) with attenuation depths derived from remotely sensed ocean color data. The OGCM is a reduced gravity, primitive equation, sigma coordinate model coupled to an advective atmospheric mixed layer model. These simulations use a single exponential profile for radiation attenuation in the water column, which is quite accurate for OGCMs with fairly coarse vertical resolution. The control runs use an attenuation depth of 17 m while the simulations use spatially variable attenuation depths. When a variable depth oceanic mixed layer is explicitly represented with interactive surface heat fluxes, the results can be counterintuitive. In the eastern equatorial Pacific, a tropical ocean region with one of the strongest biological activity, the realistic attenuation depths result in increased loss of radiation to the subsurface, but result in increased sea surface temperatures (SSTs) compared to the control run. Enhanced subsurface heating leads to weaker stratification, deeper mixed layers, reduced surface divergence, and hence less upwelling and entrainment. Thus, some of the systematic deficiencies in the present-day climate models, such as the colder than observed cold tongue in the equatorial Pacific may simply be related to inaccurate representation of the penetrative radiation and can be improved by the formulation presented here. The differences in ecosystems in each of the tropical oceans are clearly manifested in the manner in which biological heat trapping affects the upper ocean. While the tropical Atlantic has many similarities to the Pacific, the Amazon, Congo, and Niger Rivers' discharges dominate the attenuation of radiation. In the Indian Ocean, elevated biological activity and heat trapping are away from the equator in the Arabian Sea and the southern Tropics. For climate models, in view of their sensitivity to the zonal distribution of SST, using a basin mean of the ocean color?derived attenuation depth reduces the SST errors significantly in the Pacific although they occur in regions of high mean SST and may have potential feedbacks in coupled climate models. On the other hand, the spatial variations of attenuation depths in the Atlantic are crucial since using the basin mean produces significant errors. Thus the simplest and the most economic formulation is to simply employ the annual mean spatially variable attenuation depths derived from ocean color.