The low-frequency variance of the surface wave in the area of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) and its correlation with the antarctic circumpolar wave (ACW) are focused on. The analysis of the series of 44 a significant wave height (SWH) interannual anomalies reveals that the SWH anomalies have a strong periodicity of about 4-5 a and this signal propagates eastward obviously from 1985 to 1995, which needs about 8 a to complete a mimacircle around the earth. The method of empirical orthogonal function (EOF) is used to analyze the filtered monthly SWH anomalies to study the spatio-temporal distributions and the propagation characteristics of the low-frequency signals in the wave field. Both the dominant wavenumber-2 pattern in space and the propagation feature in the south Pacific, the south Atlantic and the south Indian ocean show strong consistency with the ACW. So it is reasonable to conclude that the ACW signal also exists in the wave field. The ACW is important for the climate in the Southern Ocean, so it is worth to pay more attention to the large-scale effect of the surface wave, which may also be important for climate studies.
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