What caused recent shifts in tropical pacific decadal sea-level trends?

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans 124 (2019): 7575-7590, doi: 10.1029/2019JC015339.Satellite altimetry reveals substantial decadal variability in sea level across the tropical Pacific during 1993–2015. An ocean state estimate that faithfully reproduces the observations is used to elucidate the origin of these low-frequency tropical Pacific variations. Analysis of the hydrostatic equation reveals that recent decadal changes in the tropical Pacific are mainly hermosteric in nature, related to changes in upper-ocean heat content. A forcing experiment performed with the numerical model suggests that anomalous wind stress was an important driver of the relevant heat storage and thermosteric variation. Closed budget diagnostics further clarify that the wind-stress-related thermosteric variation resulted from the joint actions of large-scale ocean advection and local surface heat flux, such that advection controlled the budget over shorter, intraseasonal to interannual time scales, and local surface heat flux became increasingly influential at longer decadal periods. In particular, local surface heat flux was important in contributing to a recent reversal of decadal trends in the tropical Pacific. Contributions from local surface heat flux partly reflect damping latent heat flux tied to wind-stress-driven sea-surface-temperature variations.This work was supported by NSF Awards OCE‐1558966 and OCE‐1834739. Support of the ECCO project by the NASA Physical Oceanography, Cryospheric Science, and Modeling, Analysis and Prediction programs is also acknowledged. We thank Ou Wang (NASA JPL) for performing the forcing perturbation experiment. Comments from two anonymous reviewers were helpful. Altimetry observations used in Figures 1 and 2 were downloaded from CSIRO (http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_data_cmar.html). ECCOv4 output is available on the group website (https://ecco.jpl.nasa.gov/).2020-04-3