Research and Analysis of the Large-Scale Signals in Wave Field of the Southern Ocean

This paper used the significant wave height and Stokes drift data from the ERA-5 dataset from 1981 to 2020 provided by the ECMWF studied the wave climate in the Southern Ocean. By selecting typical ENSO events from 1981 to 2020, the distribution of significant wave height in the Southern Ocean during the typical events was compared with the distribution of 40-year mean significant wave height, and the discovered abnormal distribution was explained with the theory of wave’s large-scale effects. Furthermore, this paper analyzed the anomalous distribution of Stokes drift in the Southern Ocean during ENSO events, and demonstrated the relationship between the wave transport from the Southern Ocean and the occurrence of ENSO events. This paper found that the existence of the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave (ACW) in wave fields, and the different results of EOF analysis between wind wave and swell indicated that the ACW is composed of two types of signals: ACW2 and ACW3. By comparing the interannual variation trend in the time series of EOF analysis with the Niño3.4 index, the relationship between the ENSO events and the ACW in wave field was further proposed.