Characteristics of low-frequency sea surface temperature fluctuations in the tropical Atlantic

Abstract

Sea surface temperature anomalies in the tropical Atlantic Ocean are reexamined to investigate an apparent low-frequency oscillation that has been described as a fluctuating dipole structure with poles north and south of the equator and a node near the ITCZ. Using principal components rotated by the varimax method and simple correlations of area-averaged temperatures, we show that during the 1964-88 interval SST anomalies north and south of the ITCZ are not significantly correlated. Therefore, the low-frequency variation, with an apparent decadal period observed in the SST gradient across the ITCZ during 1964-88, does not arise from temporally coherent and out-of-phase fluctuations in each hemisphere and cannot be characterized as a dipole. -from Authors