Contribution of Increased Agulhas Leakage to Tropical Atlantic Warming

Abstract

he upper tropical Atlantic Ocean has markedly warmed since the 1960s. It has been shown that this warming was not due to local heat fluxes and that the trade winds that drive the coastal and equatorial upwelling have intensified rather than weakened. Remote forcing might thus have played an important role. Here, model experiments are used to investigate the contribution from an increased inflow of warm Indian Ocean water through Agulhas leakage. A high-resolution hindcast experiment with interannually varying forcing for the time period 1948?2007, in which Agulhas leakage increases by about 45% from the 1960s to the early 2000s, reproduces the observed warming trend. To tease out the role of Agulhas leakage, a sensitivity experiment designed to only increase Agulhas leakage is used. Compared to a control simulation, it shows a pronounced warming in the upper tropical Atlantic Ocean. A Lagrangian trajectory analysis confirms that a significant portion of Agulhas leakage water reaches the upper 300 m of the tropical Atlantic Ocean within two decades and that the tropical Atlantic warming in the sensitivity experiment is mainly due to water of Agulhas origin. Therefore, it is suggested that the increased trade winds since the 1960s favor upwelling of warmer subsurface waters, which in part originate from the Agulhas, leading to higher SSTs in the tropics.