Mon. May 25, 2015 4:15 PM - 6:00 PM 202 (2F)

Convener:*Niklas Schneider(International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa), Masami Nonaka(Application Laboratory, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology), Bunmei Taguchi(Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology), Hisashi Nakamura(Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo), Chair:Hisashi Nakamura(Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo), Masami Nonaka(Application Laboratory, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology)

The role of ocean salinity in Indo-Pacific climate fluctuations is coming into sharper focus with recent observational campaigns and Argo, newly available observation of surface salinity from space, and the analysis of numerical simulation of the ocean and climate. This session seeks observational, modeling and theoretical contributions investigating the variations of salinity, and their role in climate variations of the Pacific and Indian Ocean on time scales from days to decades. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, barrier layer dynamics, the generation, propagation and fate of density compensated temperature and salinity (spiciness) variability, fluctuations and changes in mode waters, tropical and extra-tropical exchanges, and the response of the coupled ocean atmosphere system to changes of salinity.