Barycenter reflected equatorial Pacific sea level structure evolution and its indication of ENSO events

Abstract

Focused on the zonal and meridional response of sea level change to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, this paper retrieves the overall average, positive anomaly and negative anomaly sea surface height (SSH) series of equatorial Pacific area (EPA) from satellite altimetry data from 1993 to 2013. The barycenter method is then applied to each of the three series to get the zonal and meridional barycenter coordinates. The barycenter coordinates are then compared with the Multivariate ENSO index (MEI) to reveal the zonal and meridional response of sea level change to ENSO. The meridional and zonal spatio-temporal evolutionary processes of sea level change in EPA during different ENSO events are reconstructed by the Principle Tensor Analysis of Rank 3 Method (PTA3). Comparative analysis shows that the meridional change of positive anomalies barycenter, rather than the mean series of sea level height anomaly in EPA, can well characterize the intensity and evolutionary process of ENSO events. Meanwhile, the zonal migration of barycenter may reflect the lag adjustment of the sea level to the ENSO signal. The analysis on the meridional and zonal evolution of the sea level change in different ENSO periods shows that the response of sea level change to the ENSO events can be mainly characterized by the position differences between positive and negative sea level anomaly barycenter, SSH gradient in the meridional direction and the inconsistency in the overall spatial structure and temporal evolution characteristics in the zonal direction.

Keywords

• Sea level changes
• ENSO
• Equatorial Pacific
• Satellite altimetry
• Principal tensor analysis
• Barycenter method