| Section S | S index | 711-719 of 1376 terms |
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southeast trades—(Or southeast trade winds.) See trade winds.
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southeaster—(Often contracted sou'easter.) A southeasterly wind, particularly a strong wind or gale, for example, the winter southeast storms of the Bay of San Francisco. A specific application to a local wind is the southeaster of Table Bay, South Africa (Table Mountain southeaster). When there are dark clouds over Table Mountain, it is a black southeaster; when there are no clouds, it is a blind southeaster. See Cape doctor.
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souther—A south wind, especially a strong wind or gale.
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Southern Oscillation index—A measure of the state of the Southern Oscillation. A common index used for this purpose is the sea level pressure at Tahiti minus the sea level pressure at Darwin, Australia, divided by the standard deviation of that quantity. It is closely associated with El Niño and is thus often referred to as ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation).
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Southern Oscillation—Originally defined in 1924 by Gilbert Walker as a low-latitude, planetary- scale “seesaw” in sea level pressure, with one pole in the eastern Pacific and the other in the western Pacific–Indian Ocean region. The pressure seesaw is associated with a global pattern of atmospheric anomalies in circulation, temperature, and precipitation. The primary timescale of the oscillation is interannual–multiyear, and it is now recognized to be primarily a response to basin-scale sea surface temperature variations in the equatorial Pacific arising from coupled ocean–atmosphere interactions, the opposite extremes of which are the El Niño and La Niña warm and cold events. See also ENSO.
Philander, S. George, 1990: El Niño, La Niña, and the Southern Oscillation, Academic Press, International Geophysics Series, Vol. 46
Walker, G. T., 1924: Correlation of seasonal variations in weather IX: A further study of world weather. Mem. Indian Meteor. Dep., 24, 275–332.
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Southwest Monsoon Current—The broad eastward flow that dominates the Indian Ocean north of 5°S during the southwest monsoon season (June–October) and extends into the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. Current speeds are generally 0.2–0.3 m s−1 but increase to 0.5–1.0 m s−1 south of Sri Lanka. The Southwest Monsoon Current replaces the westward flowing North Equatorial Current and absorbs the eastward flowing Equatorial Countercurrent of the northeast monsoon season.
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