Seasonal Variation of the Land Breeze System in the Southwestern Bay of Bengal and Its Influence on Air‐Sea Interactions

Abstract

Sea surface temperature (SST) in the Bay of Bengal (BoB) plays a vital role in determining the spatio-temporal variability of Indian summer monsoon precipitation (Jiang & Li, 2011;Samanta et al., 2018;Shenoi et al., 2002). Due to the persistent occurrence of the relatively thin salt-stratified mixed layers, primarily owing to a large influx of freshwater from intense precipitation and continental rivers (Girishkumar et al., 2011;Rao and Sivakumar, 2003;Shetye et al., 1996;Thadathil et al., 2007), SST in the BoB is highly sensitive to surface fluxes (Duncan & Han, 2009). Moreover, the SST in the BoB is always higher than 28°C (Shenoi et al., 2002), a favorable condition for the formation of deep convection in the tropics. Due to the high mean SST, a small change in its magnitude can significantly feedback to the overlying atmosphere so as to influence the amplitude of intraseasonal and interannual signals over the BoB. Hence, it is imperative to understand the processes affecting air-sea fluxes that modulate SST in the BoB on different temporal scales to better represent ocean-atmosphere interactions in weather and climate forecast models.

Impacts of the Madden‐Julian Oscillation on Marginal Sea Heatwaves of the Southeastern Tropical Indian Ocean

“…The heat fluxes used in this study are also derived from ERA5 reanalysis data. Since there is no in-situ observation of surface heat fluxes (SHF) in the SETIO region, we compared the ERA5 longwave and shortwave radiation with measurements of the Research Moored Array for African-Asian-Australian Monsoon Analysis and Prediction (RAMA; Athulya et al, 2023) and achieved favorable agreement (Figure not shown). We also utilize the daily ocean temperature, mixed layer depth (MLD), and currents of 1993-2020 from the global ocean physical reanalysis product GLORYS12V1 created by Mercator Ocean with a horizontal resolution of 1 / 12 °and 50 vertical levels.…”