A dataset of the wind-driven global ocean circulation for climate research

Abstract

Over the past decades, reanalyses of both the atmosphere and the ocean have been generated and commonly used for research on climate variability and climate change. These include the NCEP/NCAR atmospheric circulation reanalysis, the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA), and the thermal reanalysis of the CSIRO and BMRC of the upper Pacific and Indian Ocean. Separately, there have been several other efforts that focused on a specific field of the coupled climate system, such as the sea level data set (Church et al., 2004) and the global rainfall dataset (Xie and Arkin, 1996). Here we provide a global wind-driven barotropic circulation dataset as part of the global reanalysis effort. The data sets include depth-integrated stream-function and steric heights calculated for ERA40 and NCEP monthly winds using Stuart Godfrey’s Island Rule Sverdrup model (Godfrey, 1989). The data will be made available to the Australian research community. In this talk, we will provide a description of the dataset and give examples of its applications. These include an examination of the temporal behaviour of the Indonesian Throughflow, trends of the ENSO discharge/recharge process in the Indo-Pacific system, and subtropical gyre spin-up associated with the southern annular mode. The caveats in using the datasets will also be discussed.