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...
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was considerable interest in near-equatorial variability at periods of days to weeks associated with oceanic equatorial inertia–gravity waves and mixed Rossby–gravity waves. At that time, the measurements available for studying these waves were much more limited than today: most of the available observations were...
The vertical propagation of Coastal Trapped Waves (CTWs) due to subsurface ridges is explored with the help of linear numerical and analytical models. Results show that submerged ridges projecting from the shoreline can scatter a horizontally propagating single baroclinic mode Kelvin wave into both upward and downward propagating Kelvin wave...
Many ecologists and environmental scientists witnessing the scale of current environmental change are becoming increasingly alarmed about how humanity is pushing the boundaries of the Earth’s systems beyond sustainable levels. The world urgently needs global society to redirect itself toward a more sustainable future: one that moves intergenerational equity and...
Altimetric data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON mission will be used for studies of global ocean circulation and marine geophysics. However, it is first necessary to remove the ocean tides, which are aliased in the raw data. The tides are constrained by two distinct types of information: the hydrodynamic equations which the...
Planetary or Rossby waves are the predominant way in which the ocean adjusts on long (year to decade) timescales. The motion of long planetary waves is westward, at speeds ≥1 cm s⁻¹ . Until recently, very few experimental investigations of such waves were possible because of scarce data. The advent...
The wind speed and significant wave height (H1/3) dependencies of the sea state is in altimeter estimates of sea level, expressed in the form ∆hSSB=bH1/3, are examined from least squares analysis of 21 cycles of collinear TOPEX data. The bias coefficient b is found to increase in magnitude with increasing...
A formalism recently developed for determining the effects of sampling errors on objectively smoothed fields constructed from an irregularly sampled dataset is applied to investigate the relative merits of single and multiple satellite altimeter missions. For small smoothing parameters, the expected squared error of smoothed fields of sea surface height...
Westward propagating Gaussian eddies with statistical characteristics estimated from altimeter observations but with purely random starting locations and times produce striated features in time-averaged maps of zonal velocity. The striations in these simulations have magnitudes and meridional scales comparable to those reported from time-averaged altimeter observations and model output in...