Sea Surface Temperature variations over Kuroshio in the East China Sea

¹ College of Meteorology and Oceanography, National University of Defense Technology, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China
² Nanjing Foreign Language School, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China
³ College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, People’s Republic of China

^* Corresponding author: hmyu@ouc.edu.cn

Abstract

Using daily OISST. V2 data with a spatial resolution of 0.25 ° x 0.25 ° from NOAA, Sea Surface Temperature (SST) variations over Kuroshio in the East China Sea during the past twenty-five years (1993-2017) are studied. The results show that the distribution of SST decreases from south to northwest and northeast, and the spatial gradient is large in winter and spring while weak in summer and autumn. Besides, Kuroshio warm tongue has the feature of “strong in spring while weak in summer”. Moreover, interannual variability of SST over Kuroshio synchronous warming/cooling dominated, followed by the northwest-southeast phase changing, and it shows a close connection with ENSO. The spectrum analysis shows that interannual variability of SST has significant semi-annual and 28 months period of oscillation. In addition, there are significant 8 months-lag correlations between averaged SST anomaly of Kuroshio in the East China Sea and ENSO index.