Marine biological feedback associated with Indian Ocean Dipole in a coupled ocean/biogeochemical model

The impact of marine ecosystem on the tropical climate variability in the Indian Ocean is investigated by performing coupled ocean/biogeochemical model experiments, which are forced by realistic surface winds from 1951 to 2010. Results from a suite of chlorophyll perturbation experiments reveal that the presence of chlorophyll can have significant effects on the characteristics of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), including its amplitude and skewness, as well as on the mean state. Specifically, chlorophyll increases mean sea surface temperature due to direct biological heating in regions where the mean mixed layer depth is generally shallow. It is also found that the presence of chlorophyll affects the IOD magnitude by two different processes: One is the amplifying effect by the mean chlorophyll, which leads to shoaling of mean thermocline depth, and the other is the damping effect by the interactively varying chlorophyll coupled with the physical model. There is also a biological impact on the skewness of the IOD, resulting in enhanced positive skewness. This skewness change is primarily caused by the phase dependency of the above two contradicting effects involving the asymmetric thermocline feedback and the nonlinear mixed layer heating.