Air-Sea Interaction in the Western Pacific in Relation to the Asian-Australian Monsoon System
Roger Lukas
Department of Oceanography University of Hawaii
The Asian-Australian monsoons are due to complex large-, regional- and local-scale coupled ocean-atmosphere-land system interactions. Interannual variations of this monsoon system cannot be understood in isolation from the very strong annual variation, and without consideration of localized dynamics. Analyses of ocean temperature, sea level, surface wind and rainfall datasets are presented for the Indo-Pacific sector which highlight nonlinear interactions across time and space scales as well as across the ocean interface. It is fortunate that dynamically-consistent subsurface ocean thermal data analyses are available over the past 20 years in the western Pacific to support this study. Lacking systematic, basin-wide observations of the Indian Ocean, the role of ocean dynamics and thermodynamics in the Asian-Australian Monsoon system cannot be evaluated properly. However, some indications of their importance are provided by sea surface temperature variations.
