The Indonesian Throughflow is an ocean current that transports water between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean through the Indonesian Archipelago. In the northern part it enters the Indonesian seas through the Makassar Strait and Malacca Straits. It leaves the Indonesian seas, which function like a basin, south through the Lombok Strait and Timor passage. The direction of the transport is strongly temporal dependent on seasonal and annual climate, although the total net annual transport is mostly southward from the Pacific Ocean into the Indian Ocean. In the available data only an annual net northerly directed transport through the southern boundaries was seen in 1998, which can be explained as post El Niño effects. This directly shows the relation between the global climate and the Indonesian Throughflow. An ocean current is any more or less permanent or continuous, directed movement of ocean water that flows in one of the Earths oceans. ... World map depicting Malay Archipelago The Malay Archipelago is a vast archipelago located between mainland Southeastern Asia (Indochina) and Australia. ... Makassar Strait is a strait between the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi in Indonesia. ... The Straits of Malacca is a narrow stretch of water between Peninsular Malaysia (West Malaysia) and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. ... The Lombok Strait is a strait connecting the Java Sea to the Indian Ocean, located between the islands of Bali and Lombok. ... Chart of ocean surface temperature anomaly [°C] during the last strong El Niño in December 1997 El Niño and La Niña (also written in English as El Nino and La Nina) are major temperature fluctuations in surface waters of the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean. ...
An important feature of the Indonesian Throughflow is that because the water in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean has a higher temperature and lower salinity than the water in the Indian Ocean, the Throughflow transports large amounts of relatively warm and fresh water to the Indian Ocean. When the Indonesian Throughflow through Lombok Strait and the Timor passage enters the Indian Ocean it is advected towards Africa within Indian South equatorial current. Here it eventually exits the Indian Ocean with the Agulhas current around South Africa into the Atlantic Ocean. So the Indonesian Throughflow transports a significant amount of Pacific Ocean heat into the southwest Indian Ocean, which is 10,000 km away from the Lombok Strait.[1] Annual mean sea surface salinity for the World Ocean. ... Satellite photograph of Lombok, showing its volcano. ... Map of Timor Timor Island from space, November 1989. ... Agulhas is a village in South Africa. ... km redirects here. ...
My focus was on the tropical Indian Ocean: the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the IndonesianThroughflow (red lines shown on the survey map).
The IndonesianThroughflow is the transport of warm and fresh Pacific waters into the Indian Ocean via the Indonesian seas, and it has a major impact on the mass, heat, and freshwater budgets of the South Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Our current view of the Throughflow is that it has 3 primary components: a shallow surface Ekman flow, an advection by nonlinear Throughflow eddies, and a mean geostrophic component.
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