DYNAMICS OF COUPLED OCEAN- ATMOSPHERE MODELS: The Tropical Problem

Large-scale ocean-atmosphere interaction plays a crucial role in natural climate variability on a broad range of time scales and in anthropogenic climate change. The development of coupled ocean-atmosphere models is thus widely regarded as essential for simulating, understanding, and predicting the global climate system. Although these efforts typically benefit from years of previous work with atmospheric and oceanic models, coupling the two components represents a major step because of the new interactions introduced into the system. These can produce new phenomena, not found in either medium alone, the mechanisms for which present exciting theoretical problems. The removal of artificial negative feedbacks