Estudo da fonte aparente de calor e do sumidouro aparente de umidade sobre a Amazônia e o Nordeste do Brasil em alguns anos de El Niño, La Niña e normais.

Abstract

In this work, we investigate both the apparent heat source Q1 and the apparent moisture sink Q2 for El Niño, La Niña and normal years. The aim is determining the level of maximum Q1 and Q2 and the intensity and position of Q1 in relation to Q2. Data used are the ECMWF reanalysis and the study spans the period from October through March for each episode. Initially we show tables containing the level where the maximum occurs based on monthly averages for each episode. The analyses are focused on Amazonia and Northeast Brazil. In the sequence, we investigate the intensities of both Q1 and Q2 for two reference levels through Hovmöller diagrams along the 5°S latitude. The results show differences between Northeast Brazil and Amazônia when the level of occurrence of the maximum, the space location and the intensity of both Q1 and Q2 are concerned. Moreover there are substantial event-to-event differences for both regions. La Niña years show a more organized structure in terms of the level of occurrence of Q1 and Q2. On the other hand, El Niño years show a more disorganized structure. Finally, we found that from the viewpoint of a data set with horizontal resolution of 2.5 degree, tropical Brazil admits values of Q1 as large as 50K/day.