Characteristics of Low-Frequency Sea Surface Temperature Fluctuations in the Tropical Atlantic

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Abstract
Sea surface temperature anomalies in the tropical Atlantic Ocean are reexamined to investigate an apparent low-frequency oscillation that has been described as a fluctuating dipole structure with poles north and south of the equator and a node near the ITCZ. Using principal components rotated by the varimax method and simple correlations of area-averaged temperatures, we show that during the 1964–88 interval SST anomalies north and south of the ITCZ are not significantly correlated. Therefore, the low-frequency variation, with an apparent decadal period observed in the SST gradient across the ITCZ during 1964–88, does not arise from temporally coherent and out-of-phase fluctuations in each hemisphere and cannot be characterized as a dipole.