TITLE:
Northwest Indian Ocean’s Spring Cooling
AUTHORS:
Kern E. Kenyon
KEYWORDS:
Indian Ocean, Spring Cooling
JOURNAL NAME:
Natural Science,
Vol.6 No.10,
June
20,
2014
ABSTRACT:
A
major cooling down of the northwestern Indian Ocean’s surface, including the
Arabian Sea, starts in May, according to a well-known world atlas of SSTs. This
is before the southwest monsoon which usually begins in June. Also within one
year, there are two surface temperature maxima and two minima, which is not
typical for the northern hemisphere. A surface current, cooler than the
surrounding water, crosses the equator in April and May heading north and east
on the western side of the ocean. That proposal is consistent with the given
SST information. The warmer surrounding water is
then moved to east and south as a consequence. Since wind driving is not available for initiation, the relatively cool northeastward current is thought to be
caused by a thermohaline force related to the unstable northward temperature
gradient in the west, which is of constant sign right across the equator
beginning in May: cool in the south monotonically increasing to warm in the
north.