Tropical Instability Waves

Tropical Instability Waves

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 6 Comments

In Chapter 12 of the book, we present the hypothesis that tropical instability waves (TIW) of the equatorial Pacific are the higher wavenumber (and higher frequency) companion to the lower wavenumber ENSO (El Nino /Southern Oscillation) behavior. See Fig 1 below.

Figure 1 : Tropical Instability Waves along the equator have about a ~15x higher wavenumber than the ENSO wave.

TIW wavetrains are also observed in the equatorial Atlantic so would be considered alongside the AMO there as the high wavenumber and low wavenumber pairing.

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