Unstable Tropical Air-Sea Interaction Waves and Their Physical Mechanisms

In this paper, the tropical air-sea interaction is discussed by using a simple air-sea coupled model, in which the inertia-gravity waves are filtered off and only the equatorial Rossby waves are reserved in both the atmosphere and the ocean. There exist two kinds of air-sea interaction waves in the coupled model, that is, the high-frequency fast waves and the low-frequency slow waves. The phase speed of the fast waves is westward and the frequencies are close to those of the equatorial Rossby waves in the atmosphere. The slow waves propagate westward in the part of short wavelengths and eastward in that of long wavelengths. There exist instabilities for both the westward and eastward propagating slow waves. If the fast waves are filtered off, there is little effect on the slow waves which have great in-fluence on the long range process in the tropical air-sea coupled system. According to the tropical air-sea interaction waves we obtain here, a possible explanation to the propagating process of ENSO events is given.