STUDY ON THE AIR-SEA INTERACTION ON THE INTERANNUAL TIME SCALE IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA*

In this paper we document the correlationship between sea surface temperature(SST) and low level-winds such as sea level wind and 850 hPa wind in the South China Sea(SCS) based on COADS(1958-1987) and ECMWF objective analysis data(1973-1986).Further statistical analyses tell us that there is a fixed SCS basin mode for variations both of SST and low-level winds in the region on the interannual time scale due to air-sea interactions.A simplified,coupled model that is designed following the McCreary and Anderson's(1985) model and includes the feedback between the upper ocean and the circulation of East Asian monsoon demonstrates an interannual oscillation in the coupled air-sea system,which is similar to the observations in the SCS.