Investigation of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) variations in the Arabian Sea from 2010 to 2017

The warming process in the Indian Ocean is a major contributor to the overall global warming trend of the global oceans and the contribution of the Arabian Sea is remarkable due to the special conditions governing it, geographically and monsoon winds. In this study, inter-and intra-annual variations of SST, SSS were studied from 2010 to 2017 using the MITgcm model in the Arabian Sea with the most accurate bathymetric data and the spatial resolution of 0.033deg and monthly temporal resolution. For this purpose, temperature, salinity, evaporation minus precipitation rate, wind, net heat flux with a spatial resolution of 1 degree and monthly temporal resolution as the initial data were first introduced to the model. In this model, Navier-Stokes equations in nonlinear, incompressible and non-hydrostatic states are solved by finite volume spatial discretization over a cubic computational grid. The results of time analysis in the mentioned period indicate that the mean sea surface temperature increased about 0.36 °C and also the mean sea surface salinity by 0.04 PSU. This is despite the fact that the highest value of temperature and surface salinity during the study period is in June 2016, the values of these variables are 30°C and 36.51 PSU respectively. The reasons can be attributed to factors such as he excess of evaporation over precipitation in the Arabian Sea, Monsoon wind stress, current inversions, net surface heat flux.