Advective Ocean–Atmosphere Interaction: An Analytical Stochastic Model with Implications for Decadal Variability

Abstract Atmospheric variability on timescales of a month or longer is dominated by a small number of large-scale spatial patterns (“teleconnections”), whose time evolution has a significant stochastic component because of weather excitation. One may expect these patterns to play an important role in ocean–atmosphere interaction. On interannual and longer timescales, horizontal advection in the ocean can also play an important role in such interaction. The authors develop a simple one-dimensional stochastic model of the interaction between spatially coherent atmospheric forcing patterns and an advective ocean. The model may be considered a generalization of the zero-dimensional stochastic climate model proposed by Hasselmann. The model equations are simple enough that they can be solved analytically, allowing one to fully explore the parameter space. The authors find that the solutions fall into two regimes: (i) a slow–shallow regime where local damping effects dominate and (ii) a fast–deep regime where n...

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