The Indian Ocean Dipole is an irregular oscillation of sea surface temperature in which the western tropical Indian Ocean alternates between being warmer (a positive phase) and cooler (a negative phase) than the eastern tropical Indian Ocean near Sumatra. A positive phase drives above-average rainfall over East Africa and drought over Indonesia and Australia, and because it interacts with the Pacific El Nino-Southern Oscillation while remaining a genuinely separate coupled ocean-atmosphere mode, it is tracked as its own named phenomenon rather than folded into ENSO forecasting.
Facts
Process Type TimescaleAn event develops and decays over about six months, typically peaking between September and November, roughly once every few years. 1 First Proposed Year Cross-Tradition Connections
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