The northward-flowing Kuroshio often intrudes westward and modulates the water masses of the South and East China Seas. These intrusions transcend multiple scales in time and space, which we demonstrate here using various independent data sets. There are two hot spots of intrusion, one in the Luzon Strait and the other off northeast Taiwan, which occur synchronously when the upstream Kuroshio weakens during winter. Beyond seasonal time scales, the two intrusions were not synchronous during 1993–2013. While intrusions into the South China Sea echoed the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the intrusion northeast of Taiwan decreased markedly before 2002 but regularly reached the shelf thereafter. This change was due to the influence of westward impingements of cyclonic eddies from the open ocean on the Kuroshio main stream in place of anticyclonic eddies. During 1993–2001, decreasing cyclonic eddy impingements moved the Kuroshio away from northeast Taiwan, weakening the Kuroshio intrusion onto the East China Sea shelf. Thereafter, enhanced cyclonic eddy impingement during 2002–2013 weakened the Kuroshio transport, moving it closer to the shelf and enhancing its intrusion into the East China Sea.

We analyze a 22-year (1993-2014) record of the Kuroshio intrusion (KI) index defined from maps of mean absolute dynamic topography west of Luzon Island in the Philippines to investigate the long-term trend of the KI into the South China Sea (SCS). The monotonically increasing trend of the KI index extracted by empirical mode decomposition implies a slight decreasing trend of the meridional pressure gradient across the Luzon Strait, suggesting a weakening of the KI into the SCS based on the geostrophy. This weakening is largely due to an intensification of the upstream Kuroshio east of Luzon, which is closely correlated with the latitude of the North Equatorial Current (NEC) bifurcation off the Philippines. We also find that the latitude of the NEC bifurcation has tended to migrate southward in recent years, coincident with the strengthening of the Kuroshio east of Luzon. The forcing of the trends of low-latitude circulation is attributable to changing surface wind fields in the tropical Pacific. The trade winds have intensified in response to the recent global warming hiatus, and an anomalous cyclonic wind field has appeared over the Philippine Sea. Both of these phenomena have contributed to the southward migration of the NEC bifurcation latitude in recent years. This has led to enhance the Kuroshio transport east of Luzon, and the Kuroshio has tended to bypass the Luzon Strait without significant westward encroachment.

The Pacific climate regime has anomalous warm and cool periods every decade associated with atmospheric circulation changes, which are known to have modulated the tropical and subtropical Pacific during the recent Pacific hiatus regime (1999–2013). However, the influence of the hiatus regime on the Kuroshio Extension (KE) remains unclear. Here, we show that the KE jet underwent enhanced warming (increased 1–1.5 °C), intensification (8–19%) and northward migration (0.5–1°). The KE jet became more perturbed in the upstream region (increased by 70%, west of 146°E) but became stable downstream (perturbation decreased 5–11%, east of 146°E). A poleward shift of the mid-latitude jet stream and weakened Aleutian Low (AL) contributed to the northward migration and intensification of the KE jet, respectively. The weakened AL was associated with negative wind stress curl (WSC) in the eastern Pacific, and this WSC generated an underlying positive sea surface height anomaly that propagated westward, intensifying the KE jet when it reached the KE region. Since the recent Pacific hiatus regime ended after 2013, these changes of the KE jet may reverse during the ongoing warming regime.

The Kuroshio transports warm water in the Pacific poleward from the tropics and plays a crucial role in modulating surrounding climate. Based on independent data sets, we demonstrated that the Kuroshio weakened downstream east of Taiwan, but intensified upstream east of Luzon Island during 1993–2013. The surface velocity (volume transport) of the Kuroshio has decreased 12.5% (4~5%) off east Taiwan but increased 18% (8~18%) off east Luzon. The discordant upstream–downstream trend was attributable to changes in oceanic eddies and basin surface winds: greater (lesser) cyclonic eddies, lesser (greater) anticyclonic eddies, and positive (negative) tendency in the Pacific Basin wind curl contributed to a weakened (intensified) downstream (upstream) Kuroshio. The difference in water mass between the upstream and downstream Kuroshio was balanced by an anomalous eastward flow, the southern branch of the Subtropical Counter Current which was enhanced and evacuated the redundant water eastward into the Pacific.