The Giant African Land Snail, Achatina ( =  Lissachatina) fulica Bowdich, 1822, is a tropical crop pest species with a widespread distribution across East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and North and South America. Its current distribution is attributed primarily to the introduction of the snail to new areas by Man within the last 200 years. This st...

Rossby waves are an important phenomenon, linking processes in the west of ocean basins with forcing that occurred earlier in the east. We show evidence for such features in satellite-derived datasets of sea-surface height, temperature and ocean colour, using a section of the south Indian Ocean as an example. We discuss the possible mechanisms for an effect on chlorophyll, and we investigate th...

With the increased interest in studying the sea surface salinity anomaly (SSSA) of the tropical Indian Ocean during the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), an index describing the dipole variability of the SSSA has been pursued recently. In this study, we first use a regional ocean model with a high spatial resolution to produce a high-quality salinity simulation during the period from 1982 to 2014, fro...

East Africa is characterized by a rather dry annual precipitation climatology with two distinct rainy seasons. In order to investigate sea surface temperature driven precipitation anomalies for the region we use the algorithm of empirical orthogonal teleconnection analysis as a data mining tool. We investigate the entire East African domain as well as 5 smaller sub-regions mainly located in are...

[1] Recent findings indicate that ENSO may modulate the strength of the Indian monsoons by altering the meridional tropospheric temperature gradient between Asia and the equatorial Indian Ocean. Here we show that during northern hemisphere summertime El Niño events both colder upper tropospheric temperatures and increased vorticity anomalies are observed within the North African-Asian (NAA) jet...

[1] We investigate relationships between Indonesian drought, the state of the equatorial Indian Ocean, and ENSO using three instrumental indices spanning 1884– 1997 A.D.: 1. EQWIN, a zonal wind index for the equatorial Indian Ocean; 2. the Dipole Mode Index (DMI), an indicator of the Indian Ocean SST gradient; and 3. tropical Pacific Niño-3.4 SSTs. A regression model of the Java Sep–Dec Palmer ...

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in the tropical eastern Indian Ocean exhibits strong interannual variability, often co-occurring with positive Indian Ocean Dipole (pIOD) events. During what we identify as an extreme ITCZ event, a drastic northward shift of atmospheric convection coincides with an anomalously strong north-minus-south sea surface temperature (SST) gradient over the east...

The region of the Indian Ocean and adjacent countries has received increased attention in recent years in the context of particulate air pollution. Aerosol samples were collected over the equatorial Indian Ocean during a one-year-long sailing cruise that covered the northeast and southwest monsoons, and an intermonsoon period. The concentrations of airborne particulate matter (PM), selected met...

0079-6611/$ see front matter Crown Copyright 2 doi:10.1016/j.pocean.2008.07.002 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 2 9385 7071; fax E-mail address: [email protected] (W.P. Sijp). We examine the effect of a northward shift in the position of the southern hemisphere subpolar westerly winds (SWWs) on the vertical and horizontal distribution of temperature and salinity in the world ocean. A northwa...