Seasonal and Monthly Variation of Vertical Structure of Temperature, Salinity and Heat Flux of the Bay of Bengal

Abstract

Seasonal and monthly variations of heat flux have been investigated in this study using the Modular Ocean Model of version 3 (MOM 3) simulations and 52 years Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA) products. These variations of the heat flux in different boxes of the Bay of Bengal (BOB) in different depths show the different behavior of the boxes. It is seen that the model and SODA results are comparable. The basin shows north-south variation in the surface from winter to spring whereas there is east-west variation in the mixed layer throughout the year except winter. The remote effect caused by warm water penetration from Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Malacca and coastal Kelvin waves keeps the basin warm most of the year. This article addresses the mechanisms of the seasonal variation of the vertical structure of the temperature and heat flux components.

Keywords:

• MOM
• vertical structure
• heat flux
• BOB
• NCEP/NCAR
• SODA

Acknowledgements

The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to complete the work. This study is also supported by the INDOMOD research project (POM, RP2007) of INCOIS under the Ministry of Earth, Government of India, and OCEANSAT-II utilization project (BBC, RP2008) of SAC, ISRO. The discussions with Prof. Avijit Gangopadhyay of UMSSD, USA, are greatly acknowledged. We are grateful to core group members of GrADS software, which is freely available on the Internet. We are thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve this manuscript.