East Asia and Western Pacific METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATE

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The climatology of global SST fields for 12 calendar months
were averaged from the thirty years of 1950-1979. The
monthly anomalies of SST for every individual month were
obtained using this climatology.
III. HIGH CORRELATION BETWEEN SST IN EEP WITH THOSE IN
WORLD OCEAN FOR 1870-1979
As presented in previous paper [Pan and Oort, 1989],
the high correlation between the SST in the east equatorial
Pacific (EEP) with those in the world oceans have been
shown by the coincident variations of the annual mean
between the SST averaged from the world ocean (60°S-60 C N),
the tropical ocean (30°S-30°N) with the EEP(180 C> -80 0 W / 20 0 S-
20 D N) as well as the key region (130*W, 10 D S-^T) for the
period of 1870 to 1979, see Fig.l. Also, we calculated the
11 correlation maps of the SST in EEP with those in the
global ocean for every ten years from 1870-1879 to 1970-
1979. These eleven correlation maps have shown similar
patterns with each other (figures omitted). The averaged
mean map of them was given here, as Fig.2, to show the
typical pattern of high -positive correlations presented in
most areas of the tropical oce'ans with the maximum of the
value 0.9 at the east equatorial Pacific but with the
exception at the western Pacific and eastern Indian ocean
in the tropics.
IV. ANNUAL VARIATION OF THE CORRELATION BETWEEN SST
WITH THOSE IN GLOBAL OCEAN
IN EEP
In order to understand the seasonal change of the
connections of SST between the EEP with the global oceans,
the same correlation maps for the 12 calendar months for
the period 1950-1979 were calculated. Similar to those for
the 11 decades, the correlation maps for the 12 calendar
months also display a similar pattern as shown in Fig.2.
Fig. 3 gave parts of the correlation maps for the 12
calendar months, i.e. January, April, July and October.
Although the major pattern of the distributions of the
correlation coefficients are fairly steady during an annual
cycle, but in the areas of the western Pacific and the
eastern Indian ocean of the tropics, the connections of SST
with the EEP are more variable. Not only the magnitudes of
the correlation coefficients are very small, even the sign
of them has been changed between different calendar month.
V. STANDARD DEVIATION FOR THE 12 CORRELATION MAPS
Then, the standard deviation from the 12 correlation
maps were calculated as shown in Fig.4. It is clear to give
the distribution for the seasonal change of the
correlations. Where the magnitude of the standard deviation
is larger (smaller), the connection of SST with those in
EEP is weaker (closer) . Consistently with the 12 correlation