This movie shows the seasonal cycle of the warm pool for two years from the integration of a coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model (ECHO, developed at the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, the code came to us courtesy Mojib Latif).
The top panel shows sea surface temperature in degrees Celsius, as a function of latitude and longitude. The lower panels show a measure for the depth of the warm pool: the depth of waters with temperatures larger than 27C. The color coding of the depth is given by the color bar on the right.
Click here to see this as a movie
Niklas Schneider: niklas@moana.ucsd.edu