Improved scheme for determining the thermal centroid of the oceanic warm pool using sea surface temperature data

During the past two decades, concern about the western Pacific Warm Pool (WP) has been growing following the recognition of its significant role in global climate change and its close association with El Nino-Southern Oscillation phenomena. A fundamental issue in WP related studies is to locate its centroid and track its trajectory. The method used by some previous researchers for estimating the WP position seems to oversimplify the problem to a purely geometric one. This, however, is found to be systematically biased in both zonal and meridional directions. A new scheme for determining the WP centroid, which takes into account the thermal structure of the surface water, is proposed, resulting in a significant improvement in precise tracking of the WP trajectory compared to previous results.