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

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.

This research was supported by the
PREDICATE EU project (EVK2 – CT-1999 – 0020,). First author was supported by the PRISM EU project (EVR1 – CT-2001 – 40012).

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