The imprint of the ENSO activities on the South China Sea wave climate
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The imprint of the ENSO activities on the South China Sea wave climate Xuechao Wang 1,2 & Qin-Yan Liu 1,3 & Dandan Sui 1 & Dongxiao Wang 4,5 Received: 23 March 2020 / Accepted: 14 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Global warming is changing the global wave climate, making waves stronger. In this study, we find that the wave climate in the South China Sea (SCS) undergoes an intensifying trend under global warming background, by examining the ERA-5 wave reanalysis data over 1979–2018. Results show a significant increase in most of the SCS, of 0.2% per year in significant wave height (SWH) and 0.15% per year in wave period (WP), but there is no significant change in surface wind speed (WS), which may correspond to the weakening of the Asian monsoon. The increase of the swell is the main characteristic of wave climate change in the SCS. We further examined the possible factors to cause the increasing of SWH, and found that the frequency of gale events occurring in the SCS and its adjacent regions increased over study period. The more frequent gale events can explain the significant increasing tendency of the SWH in the SCS by causing the occurrence of swell. The increasing appearance of gale events is closely related to the intensification of El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO activities also can regulate the interannual variability of wave climate in the SCS through the surface wind. Therefore, ENSO activities play an important role in the change of wave climate in the SCS. Keywords South China Sea . ERA-5 . Significant wave height/wave period . Gale events . El Niño/Southern Oscillation
1 Introduction The wave climate change in the South China Sea (SCS) is a response of ocean dynamic processes to global oceanic warming, and is closely related to ocean–atmosphere interaction. Wave climate change is important for coastal erosion, sea level rise, and offshore engineering (Melet et al. 2018; Barnard et al.
Responsible Editor: Guoping Gao * Qin-Yan Liu [email protected] * Dongxiao Wang [email protected] 1
State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography (LTO), South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China
2
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
3
Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China
4
Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory, Zhuhai, China
5
School of Marine Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
2015). The SCS is a semi-enclosed marginal sea in the western Pacific. The Luzon Strait is the main passage connecting the SCS and the west Pacific. It is also an important navigation path for the Maritime Silk Road (Liu 2014). It is therefore crucial to have a better understanding of the wave climate changes in the SCS and the mechanisms that may be driving such changes. A number of studies have reported strengthening of the wave climate during recent decades. Young et al. (2011) used a database of satellite altimeter
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