Interactions between mesoscale eddy variability and Indian Ocean dipole events in the Southeastern tropical Indian Ocean—case studies for 1994 and 1997/1998

Interannual modulation of mesoscale eddy activity at the intraseasonal timescale in the southeastern tropical Indian Ocean and its relation to the Indian Ocean dipole mode (IOD) events are investigated using results from a high-resolution ocean general circulation model. The model reproduces observed characteristics of the intraseasonal variability and its interannual modulation fairly well, with large variances of the intraseasonal variability during the 1994 and 1997/1998 IOD events. Large negative temperature anomaly off the coasts of Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands in boreal summer, due to seasonal variation and interannual anomaly, extended further to the east in 1994, and the associated strong Indonesian throughflow enhanced the baroclinic instability in the upper layer, generating anomalously large mesoscale eddy activity. The eddy heat transport, in turn, significantly affected decaying phase of the 1994 IOD event. On the other hand, the development of the cold region off the Java Island associated with the 1997/1998 IOD event occurred in boreal winter, causing weaker baroclinic instability and hence weaker eddy activity off Java. This led to little influence on the heat budget in the southeastern tropical Indian Ocean for the 1997/1998 IOD event.     

Interannual variations of the Hawaiian Lee Countercurrent induced by potential vorticity variability in the subsurface

Interannual variations of the Hawaiian Lee Countercurrent (HLCC) in the 2000s were investigated using satellite and Argo profiling float observations. The satellite-observed sea surface height shows that the geostrophic eastward current was anomalously strong to the west away from Hawaii in 2003 and 2005. However, the trade winds and the orographic wind curl dipole in the lee of Hawaii that drives the climatological mean HLCC were not particularly strong in these years, suggesting that the accelerations of the HLCC were not caused by the wind stress curl forcing around Hawaii and subsequent Rossby wave propagation. Using Argo observations, we found negative potential vorticity (PV) anomalies in the subsurface north of the HLCC in these 2 years. The pycnocline is lifted northward as low PV waters of different densities stack up in the vertical, and the HLCC is then accelerated via the thermal wind. The intensification and/or southward intrusion of the eastern subtropical mode water and subtropical mode water seem to have induced negative PV anomalies in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Using high-resolution ocean simulations, we confirmed the migrations of PV anomalies and their contributions to the HLCC accelerations. Although the HLCC is located away from the cores of major mode waters, our results suggest that interannual variations of the HLCC are affected by those of mode waters.     

Spectroscopic properties of Cr-doped melilite crystals

 Four kinds of Cr-droped melilite crystals, Ca₂MgSi₂O₇ (akermanite), CaAl₂SiO₇ (gehlenite), CaGa₂SiO₇ (Ga-gehlenite) and CaGa₂GeO₇ (GaGe-gehlenite), with different sizes of the sites for Cr ions to substitute, were grown in series, using both the CZ and FZ techniques. Although Cr⁴⁺ is regarded as a major species in melilites, the existence of Cr⁶⁺ in gehlenite is also suggested from the change in absorption spectra by annealing, and the dependence of distribution coefficient of Cr ions on growth atmosphere. Spectral peak shifts are not obvious if the host crystal field is altered in melilites, because the local environment of the sites for Cr ion is possibly changed by reforming the packing features of the host lattice. Received February 7, 1996 / Revised, accepted September 20, 1996     

A computational approach for the analysis of changes in polygon distributions

 This paper develops a computational method for analyzing changes in polygon distributions. Unmovable polygons that change discontinuously without explicit functional linkage information are discussed. Six types of primitive events are used to describe the change: 1) generation, 2) disappearance, 3) expansion, 4) shrinkage, 5) union, and 6) division. The change of polygon distributions is decomposed into a combination of these events. A computational procedure for deducing a set of events from polygon distributions of two times is proposed. The method is applied to the analysis of the spatial competition between the major and small chains of convenience stores in Tokyo, Japan. Some empirical findings are shown. Received: 3 August 2000 / Accepted: 6 February 2001     

Provenance diversification within an arc‐trench system induced by batholith development: the Cretaceous Japan case

By comparing detrital zircon U–Pb age spectra of coeval fore‐arc and back‐/intra‐arc basin sandstones, we identified the overall distributary pattern of terrigenous clastic material within the Cretaceous arc system of SW Japan. Abundant Proterozoic (c. 1500–2500 Ma) detrital grains from the interior of East Asia are present in the Cretaceous intra‐arc basin. However, after a barrier mountain range formed during batholith emplacement, Proterozoic clastics were rarely transported into the fore‐arc domain. Episodic batholith formation in Pacific‐type orogens likely played a major role in controlling terrigenous supply routes between coeval back‐arc and fore‐arc domains. The Cretaceous orogen in Japan thus provides a good template for analysing the tectono‐sedimentary development of other arc‐related basins.     

Origin of extreme summers in Europe: the Indo-Pacific connection

Extreme summers of Europe are usually affected by blocking highs that shift between Western and Eastern Europe to cause regional variations in the surface temperature anomalies. Generally, the blocking high induces a regional temperature dipole with poles of warm and cold anomalies on two sides of Europe. The extreme summers of Western Europe, when the Eastern Europe is colder than normal, are usually associated with the teleconnections arising from positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events. In contrast, analogous warm events in Eastern Europe are usually associated with La Niña. The western Pacific conditions that prevail during the turnaround phase of El Niño to La Niña are found to be responsible for developing the extreme Eastern Europe events. The role of North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is not blatant for the Eastern Europe summers though it has a weaker influence on Western Europe summers for which IOD plays a dominant role: The seasonal July–August correlation for Western Europe temperature with IOD index is higher than that with the NAO index. The teleconnections for both types of extremes are associated with a Rossby wavetrain that travel around the globe to reach the Europe. This circumglobal teleconnection is largely determined by the location of the tropospheric heat source. For Western Europe warm events, major contributions come from the atmospheric convections/diabatic heating over northwest India and southern Pakistan. For the Eastern Europe events, the convections over northwest Pacific, south of Japan, are found to project the signals on to the mid-latitude wave-guide. These patterns of teleconnection are so robust that those can be seen on daily to seasonal time-scales of atmospheric anomalies. The wavetrains are found to set-in a couple of weeks prior to the development of blocking highs and extreme hot conditions over Europe.     

Effects of Interannual Variability in the Eastern Indian Ocean on the Indonesian Throughflow

The influences of the large-scale interannual variations in the eastern Indian Ocean on the variability of the Indonesian throughflow are investigated by using an ocean general circulation model, driven by the ERS satellite winds from July 1992 to June 1997. The empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis of the simulated surface dynamic height variability captures two dominant modes on an interannual time scale, which are quite consistent with the available observations. The first mode indicates large amplitude in the western tropical Pacific and has a strong relation to the El Niño events, while the second EOF exhibits the large amplitude in the eastern Indian Ocean. The simulated net Indonesian throughflow shows an interannual variation of amplitude of about 15 Sv, with large transport from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean during 1994/95 and small transport during 1992 and 1997. It turns out that the net throughflow variation shows a high correlation with the second EOF mode (r = 0.51) for the whole five-year simulation. On the other hand, the correlation with the first mode is rather low (r = ?0.07). However, the relative importance of the EOF modes to the throughflow variability changes with time. The upper-layer transport above a depth of 230 m in the Indonesian archipelago is also affected by the second mode. The difference in the upper-layer transport across 1°S and 110°E generates warm water convergence/divergence with a magnitude of 4 Sv within the Indonesian Seas on the interannual time scale, which shows good correspondence with sea surface temperature variation averaged over the Indonesian archipelago.     

Anatomy and genesis of a subduction-related orogen: A new view of geotectonic subdivision and evolution of the Japanese Islands

Abstract The Japanese Islands represent a segment of a 450 million year old subduction-related orogen developed along the western Pacific convergent margin. The geotectonic subdivision of the Japanese Islands is newly revised on the basis of recent progress in the 1980s utilizing microfossil and chronometric mapping methods for ancient accretionary complexes and their high-P/T metamorphic equivalents. This new subdivision is based on accretion tectonics, and it contrasts strikingly with previous schemes based on‘geosyncline’tectonics, continent-continent collision-related tectonics, or terrane tectonics. Most of the geotectonic units in Japan are composed of Late Paleozoic to Cenozoic accretionary complexes and their high-PIT metamorphic equivalents, except for two units representing fragments of Precambrian cratons, which were detached from mainland Asia in the Tertiary. These ancient accretionary complexes are identified using the method of oceanic plate stratigraphy. The Japanese Islands are comprised of 12 geotectonic units, all noted in southwest Japan, five of which have along-arc equivalents in the Ryukyus. Northeast Japan has nine of these 12 geotectonic units, and East Hokkaido has three of these units. Recent field observations have shown that most of the primary geotectonic boundaries are demarcated by low-angle faults, and sometimes modified by secondary vertical normal and/or strike-slip faults. On the basis of these new observations, the tectonic evolution of the Japanese Islands is summarized in the following stages: (i) birth at a rifted Yangtze continental margin at ca 750–700 Ma; (ii) tectonic inversion from passive margin to active margin around 500 Ma; (iii) successive oceanic subduction beginning at 450 Ma and continuing to the present time; and (iv) isolation from mainland Asia by back-arc spreading at ca 20 Ma. In addition, a continent-continent collision occurred between the Yangtze and Sino-Korean cratons at 250 Ma during stage three. Five characteristic features of the 450 Ma subduction-related orogen are newly recognized here: (i) step-wise (not steady-state) growth of ancient accretionary complexes; (ii) subhorizontal piled nappe structure; (iii) tectonically downward-younging polarity; (iv) intermittent exhumation of high-P/T metamorphosed accretionary complex; and (v) microplate-induced modification. These features suggest that the subduction-related orogenic growth in Japan resulted from highly episodic processes. The episodic exhumation of high-P/T units and the formation of associated granitic batholith (i.e. formation of paired metamorphic belts) occurred approximately every 100 million years, and the timing of such orogenic culmination apparently coincides with episodic ridge subduction beneath Asia.     

Impact of the equatorial Atlantic sea surface temperature on the tropical Pacific in a CGCM

Many coupled general circulation models (CGCMs) suffer from serious model bias in the zonal gradient of sea surface temperature (SST) in the equatorial Atlantic. The bias of the equatorial Atlantic SST (EASST) may affect the interannual variability of the equatorial Atlantic, which in turn may influence the state of the tropical Pacific. In this paper we investigate the impact of the bias and the interannual variability of the EASST on the tropical Pacific in a CGCM. To determine the impact of the interannual variability of the EASST on the tropical Pacific, we compare a run in a fully coupled mode (CTL run) and a run in which the EASST is nudged toward the climatological monthly mean of the SST in the CTL run, but full air-sea coupling is allowed elsewhere (AT_m run). We find that, when the interannual variability of the EASST is excluded, the thermocline depth in the eastern equatorial Pacific is deepened, and the amplitude of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation is reduced by 30 % compared to the CTL run. The impact of the bias of the EASST on the tropical Pacific is investigated by comparing the AT_m run and a run in which the EASST is nudged toward the observed climatological monthly mean SST (AT_o run). It is found that, when the bias of the EASST is removed (i.e. AT_o run), the Gill–Matsuno type response to the warm SST anomalies in the western equatorial Atlantic induces low-level cyclonic anomalies in the eastern South Pacific, which leads to a deeper thermocline and colder SST in the South Pacific as compared to AT_m. The colder SST in the South Pacific reduces the precipitation along the South Pacific convergence zone. Our results of the model experiments demonstrate the importance of the EASST to the tropical Pacific climate.     

Petrology and mineralogy of the Yamato-86751 CV3 chondrite

Abstract— The Y-86751 chondrite (CV3) consists of fine-grained Ca- and Al-rich inclusions (CAIs), amoeboid olivine inclusions (AOIs), spinel-rich inclusions, chondrules with and without dark rims, dark inclusions, isolated minerals, metal-sulfide aggregates, and matrix. Olivines in chondrules without dark rims and AOIs coexist with magnetite and show strong zoning from a magnesian core to a ferroan rim. Spinels in spinel-rich inclusions show similar zoning. This zoning seems to be caused by exchange reaction of olivine and spinel with an oxidized nebular gas prior to the accretion onto the parent body, and the Mg/Fe diffusion in olivines and spinels took place at a temperature of about 830–860 K. At the same time, enstatite in chondrules without dark rims was replaced by ferroan olivine at the grain boundaries. This feature suggests that chondrules without dark rims, fine-grained CAIs, spinel-rich inclusions, and AOIs have experienced oxidation in an oxidizing nebular gas. The oxygen fugacity of the oxidized nebular gas was >10^?27.3 bars at about 830 K, being more than 10⁴x larger than that of the canonical nebular gas. Magnetite occurs in the Y-86751 matrix in close association with Ni-rich taenite and Co-rich metal, and it was produced under a condition with the oxygen fugacity of ～10^?38 bars at a temperature of about 620–650 K. On the other hand, olivines in chondrules with dark rims and dark inclusions are magnesian and rich in MnO. They do not show such strong zoning. Probably they were in equilibrium with a nebular gas under a redox condition different from the oxidized nebular gas that produced the zoned olivines in chondrules without dark rims.