ABSTRACT
Of all the world’s oceans and seas, the longest time series and reasonably dense spatial coverage combination is the richest for the Atlantic Ocean. Shipping routes between the Old and the New Worlds, and between colonizing countries in Europe and colonized countries/regions in Africa, Asia, and Australasia go back several centuries. A dipole or bipolar pattern was (is) produced by empirical orthogonal function analyses of tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, and maps of correlation coefficients between gridded SST anomalies and rainfall anomalies in Northeast Brazil and West Africa. Concurrently with the SST-only analyses of tropical Atlantic variability, there were several studies which combined ocean and atmosphere observations to analyze their joint variability.
