A Further Study on an Extended Nonlinear Ocean-Atmosphere Coupled Hydrodynamic Characteristic System and the Abrupt Feature of ENSO Events

An extended ocean-atmosphere coupled characteristic system including thermodynamic physical processes in ocean mixed layer is formulated in order to describe SST explicitly and remove possible limitation of ocean-atmos-phere coupling assumption in hydrodynamic ENSO models. It is revealed that there is a kind of abrupt nonlinear characteristic behaviour, which relates to rapid onset and intermittency of El Nino events, on the second order slow time scale due to the nonlinear interaction between a linear unstable low-frequency primary eigen component of ocean-atmosphere coupled Kelvin wave and its higher order harmonic components under a strong ocean-atmos-phere coupling background. And, on the other hand, there is a kind of finite amplitude nonlinear characteristic behaviour on the second order slow time scale due to the nonlinear interaction between the linear unstable primary eigen component and its higher order harmonic components under a weak ocean-atmosphere coupling background in this model system.