The Antarctic circumpolar wave and its seasonality: Intrinsic traveling modes and ENSO teleconnections

TL;DR

This paper uses nonlinear spectral analysis to identify and characterize multiple modes of variability in Southern Ocean data, revealing new insights into Antarctic circumpolar wave dynamics and its teleconnections with ENSO and other climate patterns.

Contribution

It introduces the application of nonlinear Laplacian spectral analysis to Antarctic climate data, uncovering new propagating modes and their connections to ENSO and regional climate variability.

Findings

Recovered the wavenumber-2 Antarctic circumpolar wave mode.

Identified combination modes modulating the annual cycle.

Discovered modes linked to ENSO teleconnections and sea ice reemergence patterns.

Abstract

Interannual variability in the Southern Ocean is investigated via nonlinear Laplacian spectral analysis (NLSA), an objective eigendecomposition technique for nonlinear dynamical systems that can simultaneously recover multiple timescales from data with high skill. Applied to modeled and observed sea surface temperature and sea ice concentration data, NLSA recovers the wavenumber-2 eastward propagating signal corresponding to the Antarctic circumpolar wave (ACW). During certain phases of its lifecycle, the spatial patterns of this mode display a structure that can explain the statistical origin of the Antarctic dipole pattern. Another group of modes have combination frequencies consistent with the modulation of the annual cycle by the ACW. Further examination of these newly identified modes reveals that they can have either eastward or westward propagation, combined with meridional pulsation reminiscent of sea ice reemergence patterns in the Arctic. Moreover, they exhibit smaller-scale spatial structures, and explain more Indian Ocean variance than the primary ACW modes. We attribute these modes to teleconnections between ACW and the tropical Indo-Pacific Ocean; in particular, fundamental ENSO modes and their associated combination modes with the annual cycle recovered by NLSA. Another mode extracted from the Antarctic variables displays an eastward propagating wavenumber-3 structure over the Southern Ocean, but exhibits no strong correlation to interannual Indo-Pacific variability.