Pan, Y-H., W. Richardson, and A. H. Oort, 1990: Some different charactersitics of SST between the western and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. In Air-Sea Interaction in Tropical Western Pacific, Beijing, China: China Ocean Press.

Abstract: In a previous paper [Pan and Oort 1990], the high correlation between the sea surface temperature (SST) in the eastern equatorial Pacific (EEP) with those in the world ocean has been shown by the similarities of the spatial distributions between the 11 correlation maps for the 11 decades of 1870- 1979. Then, the characteristics of the SST in the western tropical Pacific can be discussed by the standard deviation distribution from these 11 correlation maps. The area with the largest magnitude of standard deviation appears from the south-east Pacific moving north-westward to cross the western equatorial Pacific (WEP) and turning north-eastward. It implicates that the variation of SST over the western Pacific seems more independent from those in the EEP, particularly, in the Australian and east Asian monsoon region. The annual cycle of the thirty-year (1950-1979) climatology of the SST also presents the differences between the EEP and WEP. Probably, this is just to show the importance of monsoon activities in the processes of air-sea interaction over those regions.