Coupled ocean-atmosphere interaction at oceanic mesoscales

By Dudley Chelton, Shang-Ping Xie. 2010

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Satellite observations have revealed a remarkably strong positive correlation between sea-surface temperature (SST) and surface winds on oceanic mesoscales of 10-1000 km. While this SST influence on the atmosphere had previously been identified from several in situ observational studies, its widespread existence in regions of strong SST gradients throughout the World Ocean and the detailed structure of the surface wind response to SST have only become evident over the past decade from simultaneous satellite measurements of SST and surface winds. This has stimulated considerable scientific interest in the implications of this air-sea interaction to the large-scale and mesoscale circulation of the atmosphere and ocean. Convergence and divergence of surface winds in regions of spatially varying SST generate vertical motion that can penetrate deep into the atmosphere. Spatial variability of the SST field also results in a curl of the wind stress and its associated upwelling and downwelling that feeds back on the ocean and alters the SST itself. Significant progress has been made toward

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10f4fe1f802644096f276aa2ad3cbf7e9b78c453

How researchers see this paper

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In Atmospheric Science

1. M. Schlax
2. Roger Samelson
3. Larry W. O'Neill
4. P. Gaube
5. Lixin Wu
6. Xiaopei Lin
7. Dudley Chelton
8. Ping Chang

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Roger Samelson
2. Dudley Chelton
3. M. Schlax
4. P. Gaube
5. Larry W. O'Neill
6. Lixin Wu
7. Xiaopei Lin
8. Ping Chang

In Oceanography

1. Roger Samelson
2. Dudley Chelton
3. M. Schlax
4. P. Gaube
5. Larry W. O'Neill
6. Hisashi Nakamura
7. Pierre-Yves Le Traon
8. Vipin Kumar

Citations in the corpus

• Satellite Observations of Mesoscale Eddy-Induced Ekman Pumping (2015, methodology): “, the reviews by Small et al. (2008), Chelton and Xie (2010), and recent work by O’Neill et al.”
• Importance of Resolving Kuroshio Front and Eddy Influence in Simulating the North Pacific Storm Track (2017, background): “and mesoscale air–sea interactions is given by Small et al. (2008). Besides the well-established local impact, the potential role of mesoscale SSTs in forcing atmospheric storm tracks and producing remote basin-scale atmospheric response has been highlighted by recent high-resolution climate model s”