Use of breeding to detect and explain instabilities in the global ocean

Abstract

The breeding method of Toth and Kalnay finds the perturbations that grow naturally in a dynamical system like the atmosphere or the ocean. Here breeding is applied to a global ocean model forced by reanalysis winds in order to identify instabilities of weekly and monthly timescales. This study extends the method to show how the energy equations for the bred vectors can be derived with only very minimal approximations and used to assess the physical mechanisms that give rise to the instabilities. Tropical Instability Waves in the tropical Pacific are diagnosed, confirming the existence of bands of both baroclinic and barotropic energy conversions indicated earlier by Masina et al. and others. In the South Atlantic Convergence Zone, the bred vector energy analysis shows that there is kinetic to potential ocean eddy energy conversion, suggesting that the growing instabilities found in this area are forced by the wind. Copyright 2009 by the American Geophysical Union.