A Methodology for Estimating the Response of the Coastal Ocean to Meteorological Forcing: A Case Study in Bohai Bay

Abstract

AbstractThe coastal ocean sea level (SL) variations result from multiscale processes and are dominated by SL changes due to meteorological forcing. In this study, a new methodology, which combines inverted barometer correction and regression analysis (IBR), is developed to estimate the coastal ocean response to meteorological forcing in shallow water. The response is taken as the combination of the static ocean response calculated using the inverted barometer formula and the dynamic ocean response estimated using the multivariable linear regression involving atmospheric pressure and the wind component in the dominant wind orientation. IBR was implemented to estimate the coastal ocean response at two stations, E1 and E2, in Bohai Bay, China. The analyzed results indicate that at both stations, the adjusted SLs are related more to the regional wind, which is the averaged value of ERA-Interim data in Bohai Bay, than to the local wind. The estimated response using IBR with the regional meteorological forcing is much closer to the observed values than other methods, including the classical inverted barometer correction, the dynamic atmospheric correction, the multivariable linear regression, and the IBR with local forcing. The deviations between the observed values and the estimated values using IBR with regional meteorological forcing can be primarily attributed to remote wind. This case study indicates that IBR is a feasible and relatively effective method to estimate the coastal ocean response to meteorological forcing in shallow water.