Ocean, sea-ice, atmosphere oscillations in the Southern Ocean as simulated by the SINTEX coupled model

Abstract

1This study evaluates the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave (ACW) as simulated by the SINTEX coupled model. We found evidence that sea-ice treatment plays a crucial role on simulating the ACW. In particular, SST anomalies at interannual time scales describe a propagating ACW-like pattern when a dynamic thermodynamic sea-ice model is coupled with the ocean, but when sea-ice is relaxed to climatology, anomalies occur as zonally symmetric patterns that do not propagate in longitude. Moreover, from the experiment with an active sea-ice component we saw that ACW-like oscillations are strongly modulated by low frequency variability. Our result adds some extra confidence to previous studies based on relatively short series of observed data.