OA2
South China Seas and Indonesian Throughflow

Main Organiser
Eng-Soon Chan, Tropical Marine Science Institute
tmsdir@nus.edu.sg

Co-Organiser(s)
YM Edmond Lo, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technical University

Prof Peter Chu, Naval Postgraduate School
chu@oc.nps.navy.mil

Dr. Dr. Anne Mueller
Department of Earth Sciences
Steele Building
The University of Queensland
Brisbane, Qld 4072
Australia
a.muller@earth.uq.edu.au

Brief Description
The South China Sea, Malacca Straits and Indonesian Waters are an exciting domain influenced by exchanges of water between two oceans, and interactions with between the developing coastal zones and the seas. With water depths on thre order of tens of meters in some parts to order of thousands of meters in the northern portion of the South China Sea, the domain is characterized by a wide range of oecanographic processes. The hydrodynamics of dominant currents, internal waves, frontal processes, and surface mixing processes have been studied in the past. Increasingly, scientists are focusing on the warer quality and the ecology issues. This is in part due to the advancement in remote sensing capabilities. This session would provide an update of knowledge gained in the study of Malacca Straits, South China Seas and Indonesian waters and aims to promote an integration of future studies, necessary due to the wide number of nations along the boundaries of this domain.

This session will also focus on all aspects of the gateway between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It is anticipated that abstracts will be submitted to the proposed session that present, for the past years, decades or centuries, high-resolution instrumental records of changes in the regions. These abstracts may, for example, focus on patterns of heat transport and transport variability of the Indonesian Throughflow and the role of remote wind forcing. Furthermore, studies are invited which show how the Indian Ocean-Monsoon system can modulate the amplitude and the frequency of ENSO and produce interdecadal variations. Contributions based on model simulations that investigate the causes of these events, including thresholds or feedbacks in the climate system, are also encouraged. Abstracts are invited which may give evidence that the Indian Ocean has its own coupled mode of variability that is weak on its own but grows under the influence of external forcing from the Pacific Ocean.

We also invite contributions reconstructing from paleoproxies the oceanography and climate change of the last decades and centuries. These contributions may include high-resolution monitoring of chemical and isotopic tracers in seawater, measurements of geochemical and isotopic tracers in massive corals and sponges, and high-resolution measurements of coral growth parameters. Several such high-resolution records have been retrieved from the region of Austral- and Southeast-Asia, including from locations for which records of instrumental climatic and oceanographic measurements are incomplete or lacking. These records are allowing observation of climatic and oceanographic changes to be deciphered on decadal timescales over periods of up to several 100 years. In conjunction with records of numerous associated or independent proxies, such observations are important on many levels. They permit links to be drawn between climate variations and ecosystem shifts; they illustrate variability in water mass distribution and structure in the ocean; they contribute to the construction of global-scale climate records and the understanding of the relationships between climate forcing and effects; and they yield insight into the magnitude and direction of exchange of climatically important gases between ocean and atmosphere.

Contributions addressing the importance of significant regional anomalies on hemispheric and global scale climate are specifically welcome. Examples may also include the different spatial and temporal time scales of significant climate events, how they are expressed in proxy and model data, the temporal coherence with spatial forcing fingerprints as well as additivity characteristics of individual forcing components, and identification of previously underestimated factors.