Non-Linear Sea Level Variations in the Eastern Tropical Pacific

The objective of this paper is to provide an insightful interpretation for the non-linearity of the inter-annual signal in sea level change in the eastern tropical Pacific. Such a non-linearity has been already discussed elsewhere for global ocean. Herein, the residual sea level anomaly time series from TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1 altimetry is obtained by removing the significant deterministic signals from the original sea level anomaly data. Since the eastern tropical Pacific is a profound region where many processes responsible for driving the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) act, it is possible to link a few of them with the non-linearity of sea level change. In particular, not only local, usually weak, oceanatmosphere interactions exist in the eastern equatorial Pacific but this region is also remotely impacted by climatic processes acting in the western equatorial Pacific where the oceanatmosphere coupling is the strongest. The detected non-linearity of sea level change is due to the asymmetry between warm and cold ENSO episodes. Such an asymmetry can be driven by the non-linear dynamical heating associated with strong ENSO events.