INTERDECADAL SEA LEVEL VARIATION AT THE JAPANESE COAST AND LARGE SCALE CLIMATE STATE

Thirty years of monthly mean anomalies of sea level(SL) at 15 Japanese coastal stations, sea sur-face temperature (SST) and sea level pressure (SLP) in or over the northern Pacific were analyzed bycanonical correlation analysis (CCA) to study the relationship between the interdecadal SL variationand large scale climate state. Given two time-varying fields this technique identifies the pair ofspacial patterns with optimally correlated time series.The results show that there are two important air-sea interactive processes in the extratropicalPacific region for the variation of the SL at the Japanese coast on interdecadal scale. One is theocean heating or cooling of the atmosphere over the Kuroshio extension region, which results in ahuge SLP anomalous vortex with planetary spacial scale big enough to change the global climate. An-other is the large Kuroshio meander phenomenon controlled by the large-scale wind-stress curls oneyear earlier in the adjacent region of the Hawaiian Islands. The first process

Thirty years of monthly mean anomalies of sea level (SL) at 15 Japanese coastal stations, sea sur-face temperature (SST) and sea level pressure (SLP) in or over the northern Pacific were analyzed by canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to study the relationship between the interdecadal SL variation and large scale climate state. Given two time-varying fields this technique identifies the pair of spacial patterns with optimally correlated time series.The results show that there are two important air-sea interactive processes in the extratropical Pacific region for the variation of the SL at the Japanese coast on interdecadal scale. One is the ocean heating or cooling of the atmosphere over the Kuroshio extension region, which results in a huge SLP anomalous vortex with planetary spacial scale big enough to change the global climate. An-other is the large Kuroshio meander phenomenon controlled by the large-scale wind-stress curls one year earlier in the adjacent region of the Hawaiian Islands. The first process implies the heat stored in the ocean has a role in changing the climate. This hypothesis needs proof by air-sea coupled climate modelling in the near future.