The roles of vertical mixing, solar radiation, and wind stress in a model simulation of the sea surface temperature seasonal cycle in the tropical Pacific Ocean

It is found that the large SST annual cycle in the eastern equatorial pacific is, to a large extent, controlled by the annually varying mixed layer depth which, in turn, is mainly determined by the competing effects of solar radiation and wind forcing. Beside the strong effects on vertical mixing, solar radiation is the primary heating term in the surface layer heat budget, and wind forcing influences SST by driving oceanic advective processes that redistribute heat in the upper ocean. The experiments show that the amount of heat flux modification needed to eliminate the annual mean SST errors in the model is, on average, no larger than the annual mean uncertainties among the various surface flux products used in this study. -from Authors