Periodicity and patterns of ocean wind and wave climate

The Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) provides a wealth of information spanning 1979–2009 for investigation of ocean wind and wave climate. Preprocessing of the data is necessary to remove the dominant seasonal signals and to create time series of semimonthly averaged wind speed and significant wave height over a 0.5° global grid. We perform an empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis to extract the dominant space-time patterns. The results for the three major ocean basins show strong zonal structures in the winds and saturation of the swells corroborating prior works with various data sets. We reexamine the CFSR data in the frequency domain to identify periodic signals associated with published climate indices. The Fourier transform of the preprocessed time series generates spectra ranging from 1 month to 15 years period for an EOF analysis. The results demonstrate the spatial structures and periods of climate phenomena. The Arctic Oscillation dominates the Atlantic basin with a broad range of intra-annual signals off the European coasts. The Indian and Pacific Oceans are strongly influenced by inter-annual cycles of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Antarctica Oscillation. The Indian Ocean also has strong intra-annual components ranging from 50 to 80 days period. The ENSO proves to be a ubiquitous signal around the globe, and in particular, saturates the Pacific with strong influences in the equatorial region and the Southern Hemisphere Westerlies. A commonality of all basins is that the magnitude and the spatial structure of the intra-annual and inter-annual signals are similar suggesting a wide range of periods in each of the climate cycles examined