The Causal Relation within Air–Sea Interaction as Inferred from Observations

Abstract The intricate cause–effect relations in air–sea interaction are investigated using a quantitative causal inference formalism. The formalism is first validated with a classical stochastic coupled model and then applied to the observational time series of sea surface temperature (SST) and air–sea turbulent surface heat flux (SHF). We identify an overall asymmetry of causality between the two variables, namely, the causality from SHF to SST is significantly larger than that from SST to SHF over most of the global oceans. Geographically, the coupling is strongest in the tropics and gets weaker substantially in the extratropics. In the midlatitude ocean, SST makes higher contributions to the SHF variability in frontal regions. We further show that the identified causality is space and time scale dependent. The dominance of SHF driving SST occurs at basin scales, whereas the dominance of SST driving SHF mostly occurs at scales smaller than 10°. The causalities in both directions get larger with increasing time scale and are less asymmetric at longer time scales. The seasonality of the causality is also discussed here.