Summertime low clouds are common in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), but spatiotemporal patterns have not been characterized. We show the first maps of low cloudiness for the western PNW and North Pacific Ocean using a 22‐year satellite‐derived record of monthly mean low cloudiness frequency for May through September and supplemented...
Coastally trapped wind reversals along the U.S. west coast, which are often accompanied by a northward surge of fog or stratus, are an important warm—season forecast problem due to their impact on coastal maritime activities and airport operations. Previous studies identified several possible dynamic mechanisms that could be responsible for...
Observations of oppositely directed, monthly mean alongshore currents and wind stress over the continental margin off the Pacific coast of North America motivate the theoretical examination of mean flow generation by topographic lee-wave drag. We formulate a barotropic model for wind-forced shelf-slope flow over variable topography. Our central objective is...
Satellite observations of wind stress and sea surface temperature (SST) are analyzed to investigate ocean–atmosphere interaction in the California Current System (CCS). As in regions of strong SST fronts elsewhere in the World Ocean, SST in the CCS region is positively correlated with surface wind stress when SST fronts are...
An analytical model of subtropical mode water is presented, based on ventilated thermocline
theory and on numerical solutions of a planetary geostrophic basin model. In ventilated
thermocline theory, the western pool is a region bounded on the east by subsurface
streamlines that outcrop at the western edge of the interior,...
An analytical model of subtropical mode water is presented, based on ventilated thermocline
theory and on numerical solutions of a planetary geostrophic basin model. In ventilated
thermocline theory, the western pool is a region bounded on the east by subsurface
streamlines that outcrop at the western edge of the interior,...
An analytical model of subtropical mode water is presented, based on ventilated thermocline theory and on numerical solutions of a planetary geostrophic basin model. In ventilated thermocline theory, the western pool is a region bounded on the east by subsurface streamlines that outcrop at the western edge of the interior,...
Satellite observations of ice motion are combined with model estimates of low‐level winds and surface wind stress to provide evidence for atmospheric control of sea‐ice motion through Nares Strait, between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, during two periods in 2004. The results suggest that ice flux through the strait, and its...
Lateral stirring is a basic oceanographic phenomenon affecting the distribution of physical, chemical, and biological fields. Eddy stirring at scales on the order of 100 km (the mesoscale) is fairly well understood and explicitly represented in modern eddy-resolving numerical models of global ocean circulation. The same cannot be said for...
Lateral stirring is a basic oceanographic phenomenon affecting the distribution of physical, chemical, and biological fields. Eddy stirring at scales on the order of 100 km (the mesoscale) is fairly well understood and explicitly represented in modern eddy-resolving numerical models of global ocean circulation. The same cannot be said for...