The southwest monsoon, which may be idealized as the northward movement of the intertropical convergence zone in the Indian Ocean associated with differential heating of land and ocean, brings a seasonal reversal of currents and winds in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Atmospheric convection from monsoon activity...
Interactions between surface winds and meanders in mid-latitude sea surface temperature
(SST) fronts with horizontal length scales of 100-1000 km are investigated
from satellite observations and numerical simulations. Observations from the Sea-
Winds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite show that the magnitude, direction,
curl, and divergence of the surface wind...
The nature of the teleconnection linking ENSO variability with Atlantic basin tropical storm formation is investigated. Solutions of the linearized barotropic vorticity equation forced with August–October El Niño event divergence produce upper-tropospheric vorticity anomalies over the Sahel and at the mouth of the North African–Asian (NAA) jet over the tropical...
Tropical instability waves (TIWs) are identified in three multiyear equatorial mooring records in Pacific and Atlantic cold tongues to evaluate how TIWs modulate turbulence. At 0◦ , 140 ◦W in the Pacific, TIWs are present in 43% of observations, and are associ ated with elevated vertical shear and a 40%...
The relationship between the outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) field
over the tropical Pacific and wintertime monthly precipitation for the
western U. S. is investigated, using the mid-latitude upper-air circulation
as an intermediary. Principal components (PC's) of the 500mb monthly
averaged height field over the NE Pacific and western North America...
The Inverse Ocean Modeling (IOM) system constructs and runs weak-constraint, four-dimensional variational data assimilation (W4DVAR) for any dynamical model and any observing array. The dynamics and the observing algorithms may be nonlinear but must be functionally smooth. The user need only provide the model and the observing algorithms, together with...
The northern portion of the Pacific coastal temperate rainforest (PCTR) is one of the least anthropogenically modified regions on earth and remains in many respects a frontier area to science. Rivers crossing the northern PCTR, which is also an international boundary region between British Columbia, Canada and Alaska, USA, deliver...
Thorough understanding of the mechanisms controlling the temperature structure in the surface mixed layer of the ocean and, in particular, accurate values of sea surface temperature are critical for properly parameterizing air-sea heat exchange and quantifying the amount of heat redistributed below the surface. It is however difficult to obtain...
Freshwater provided from river discharge influences the dynamics and circulation of most continental shelves around the world. It has profound effects on the transport and fate of materials and substances originated from rivers and estuaries, as well as on the ocean biogeochemistry and marine ecosystems. The effect of buoyancy forcing...