McPhaden and Hayes (1991) find that the one-day

lag in the correlation between SST and wind (pseudostress, zonal speed, and work) in the Western Pacific Warm Pool is due almost entirely to the surface heat fluxes and not from entrainment by wind-driven this website turbulent eddies. During intense but infrequent westerly wind burst events in the Western Pacific, wind-deepening of the boundary layer to the thermocline is hypothesized but latent heat fluxes at the surface are still thought to predominate ( Lukas and Lindstrom, 1991). Meridional advection may also contribute to SST during these exceptional wind events ( Feng et al., 1998). Insensitivity to Ri0 in the Western Pacific relative to the Central Selleck Metformin and Eastern Pacific ( Fig. 12) supports the hypothesis that interior diffusivity due to shear, and therefore entrainment, is not playing a role in the τ-SST correlation in that region. The sensitivity tests indicates that, given the uncertainty in the Tropical Pacific wind forcing

from Reanalysis products, calibration by comparison to data using the correlation cost alone would not be advisable. From the perspective of the unbiased “perfect model” the signal of the large perturbations to individual KPP parameters cannot be distinguished from the effect of changing between wind forcing products. Attempts to calibrate the KPP parameterizations using the cost function would yield wide probability distributions for the parameters. There are several potential sources of bias in our comparison between model and data. Because the atmosphere is not coupled to the ocean in the model, prescribed surface air temperature and specific humidity must, to some extent, control the heat flux across the ocean surface and therefore influence SST. All variables except wind speed and direction are held fixed at their NCAR/NCEP values across the alternative wind forcing experiments, so that the effect of this control over SST does not change from one wind experiment second to another. However, given that wind speed and direction are likely correlated with other prescribed variables (e.g. short wave

radiation), the default NCAR/NCEP forcing for variables other than wind may still affect the τ-SST correlation in the perturbed wind experiments. Missing processes or feedbacks may also contribute to the bias. On time scales on the order of a month, the τ-SST correlation is actually positive in the Tropical Pacific because of the atmospheric response to SST ( Bryan et al., 2010). Any feedbacks that may exist on the 40–160 h time scale used in this paper will not be represented because of the lack of a coupled atmosphere. Another possible source of bias in R could be related to the difference in spatial scales between model and data. The model has much less variability in SST than the data, even after band pass filtering ( Fig. 2).