Model of Seasonal Variability in the Indonesian Archipelago

摘要

The ultimate goal is to quantitatively understand factors determining the circulation within and through the Indonesian archipelago on a range of time-scales, and so evaluate how best to 'parameterize' the archipelago in multi-level, finite-difference, ocean general circulation models used in forecasting, which cannot resolve the archipelago's thousands of small islands and straits. This year's objectives were to construct semi-analytical process models of the variability in transport and water-mass composition within and through the Indonesian archipelago, and investigate: (1) Whether there is variability in throughflow composition on interannual timescales and longer, and if so, what is the nature of the variability and its cause, and if not, what additional processes need to be incorporated into Wajsowicz's (1993) simple model to suppress the composition variability implied by the variability in the Pacific's wind stress curl. (Sorting out discrepancies in the climatological mean composition, which had surfaced between models forced by different wind-stress data sets, was considered essential before tackling the task of seasonal variability.) (2) Whether mesoscale variability in the wind- stress curl over the southeast Asian seas is important in determining annual cycle transports, and how sensitive the annual mean and annual cycle transports are to wind-stress data set.