ABSTRACT

The tropical oceans, which are responsible for meridional and zonal heat transports that are comparable to or larger than those carried by the tropical atmosphere, have significant influence on the Earth's climate. This chapter focuses on the Atlantic Ocean variability and describes variability of the tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean as well as their linkages. Eddy activities have been identified from altimetry along the African coast, in the Mauritania-Sénégal and the Benguela upwelling systems. The equatorial oceans provide a waveguide that hosts a suite of large-scale oceanic waves that are important to ocean dynamics and ocean-atmosphere interactions, such as the oceanic equatorial Kelvin and Rossby waves and tropical instability waves. Sea surface height (SSH) measurements generally refer to altimetry-derived SSH anomalies from various missions since 1992, including the SSH products derived by merging data from two or more altimeter missions such as the archiving, validation, and interpretation of Satellite Oceanographic gridded data products.