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The tropical Atlantic wind response to El Niño forcing is robust, with weakened northeast trade winds north of the equator and strengthened southeast trade winds along and south of the equator. However, the relationship between sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the eastern equatorial Pacific and Atlantic is inconsistent, with El Niño events followed sometimes by warm and other times by cold boreal summer anomalies in the Atlantic cold tongue region. Using observational data and a hindcast simulation of the Nucleus for European Modeling of the Ocean (NEMO) global model at 0.5° resolution (NEMO-ORCA05), this inconsistent SST relationship is shown to be at least partly attributable to a delayed negative feedback in the tropical Atlantic that is active in years with a warm or neutral response in the eastern equatorial Atlantic. In these years, the boreal spring warming in the northern tropical Atlantic that is a typical response to El Niño is pronounced, setting up a strong meridional SST gradient. This leads to a negative wind stress curl anomaly to the north of the equator that generates downwelling Rossby waves. When these waves reach the western boundary, they are reflected into downwelling equatorial Kelvin waves that reach the cold tongue region in late boreal summer to counteract the initial cooling that is due to the boreal winter wind stress response to El Niño. In contrast, this initial cooling persists or is amplified in years in which the boreal spring northern tropical Atlantic warming is weak or absent either because of a positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) phase or an early termination of the Pacific El Niño event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the deployment of the Pilot Research Moored Array in the Tropic Atlantic (PIRATA) program, which is a multinational collaboration of Brazil, France, and the U.S. since 1997. It examines the goals of the program which provides data on the ocean-atmosphere changes in tropical Atlantic Ocean which is used for research and forecasts. It explores the accomplishment of PIRATA in terms of technological and organization of the data gathered and its contribution in studying climate and ocean science of tropical Atlantic Ocean. PIRATA is currently expanding its science scope and further improve the quality of climate predictions. PIRATA provides data for field research programs such as the Tropical Atlantic Climate Experiment and the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis.

Recent observations have shown evidence of intraseasonal oscillations (with periods of approximately 1–2 months) in the northern and southern tropical Atlantic trade winds. In this paper, the oceanic response to the observed intraseasonal wind variability is addressed through an analysis of the surface mixed layer heat balance, focusing on three locations in the northwestern tropical Atlantic where in situ measurements from moored buoys are available (14.5°N, 51°W; 15°N, 38°W; and 18°N, 34°W). It is found that local heat storage at all three locations is balanced primarily by wind-induced latent heat loss, which is the same mechanism that is believed to play a dominant role on interannual and decadal time scales in the region. It is also found that the intraseasonal wind speed oscillations are linked to changes in surface wind convergence and convection over the western equatorial Atlantic warm pool. These atmospheric circulation anomalies and wind-induced SST anomalies potentially feed back on one another to affect longer time-scale variability in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study determines the mean pathways and volume transports in the pycnocline and surface layer for water flowing between the subtropical and tropical Atlantic Ocean, using potential vorticity, salinity, geostrophic flow maps on isopycnal surfaces, and surface drifter velocities. In both hemispheres, subducted salinity maximum waters flow into the Tropics in the pycnocline along both interior and western boundary pathways. The North Atlantic ventilating trajectories are confined to densities between about 23.2 and 26.0 σ[sub θ] , and only about 2 Sv (Sv ≡ 10[sup 6] m[sup 3] s[sup –1] ) of water reaches the Tropics through the interior pathway, whereas the western boundary contributes about 3 Sv to the equatorward thermocline flow. Flow on shallower surfaces of this density range originates from the central Atlantic near 40°W between 12° and 16°N whereas flow on the deeper surfaces originates from near 20°W just off the coast of Africa at higher latitudes. The pathways skirt around the potential vorticity barrier located under the intertropical convergence zone and reach their westernmost location at about 10°N. In the South Atlantic, about 10 Sv of thermocline water reaches the equator through the combination of interior (4 Sv) and western boundary (6 Sv) routes in a slightly higher density range than in the North Atlantic. Similar to the North Atlantic, the shallower layers originate in the central part of the basin (along 10°–30°W at 10°–15°S) and the deeper layers originate at higher latitudes from the eastern part of the basin. However, the ventilation pathways are spread over a much wider interior window in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere that at 6°S extends from 10°W to the western boundary. The equatorward convergent flows in the thermocline upwell into the surface layer and return to the subtropics through surface poleward divergence. As much as 70% of the tropical Atlantic upwelling into the surface layer is associated with these subtropical circulation cells, with the remainder contributed by the warm return flow of the large-scale thermohaline overturning circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]