Picture: View to the Indian Ocean. Credit: Asad Photos Maldives (Pexels)
Over the past decade, our understanding of the Indian Ocean has advanced through concerted efforts toward measuring the ocean circulation and air-sea exchanges, detecting changes in water masses, and linking physical processes to ecologically important variables.
New circulation pathways and mechanisms have been discovered, which control atmospheric and oceanic mean state and variability. Intensive field campaigns and high-resolution simulations have revealed the importance of small-scale processes in setting the large-scale gradients and circulation, interactions between physical and biogeochemical processes, interactions between boundary currents and the interior, and between the surface and the deep ocean.
This review brings together a new understanding of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Indian Ocean since the last comprehensive review, describing the Indian Ocean circulation patterns, air-sea interactions and climate variability.
- Paper: Phillips, H. E., A. Tandon, R. Furue, R. Hood, C. Ummenhofer, J. Benthuysen, V. Menezes, S. Hu, B. Webber, A. Sanchez-Franks, D. Cherian, E. Shroyer, M. Feng, H. Wijesekera, A. Chatterjee, L. Yu, J. Hermes, R. Murtugudde, T. Tozuka, D. Su, A. Singh, L. Centurioni, S. Prakash, J. Wiggert: Progress in understanding of Indian Ocean circulation, variability, air-sea exchange and impacts on biogeochemistry. Ocean Science Discussions, https://doi.org/10.5194/os-2021-1.