A summary of special section: regional environmental oceanography in the South China Sea and its adjacent areas (REO-SCS)

Abstract

The South China Sea (SCS) is an important marginal sea inthe western Pacific Ocean, surrounded by 9 countries:Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phil-ippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Since ancienttimes, the SCS has served as a convenient navigationwaterway for the Southeast Asian nations to communicatewith each other and with nations of the outside world. Upto now, the SCS has been one of the busiest waterways inthe world because of the weight and high growth rate of theregion in the world economy and trade (Zheng et al. 2006).It is an inexorable trend, therefore, for the oceanographersfrom surrounding countries to pay more and more attentionto the research of regional environmental oceanography inthe SCS and its adjacent areas.The special section ‘‘Regional Environmental Ocean-ography in the South China Sea and Its Adjacent Areas(REO-SCS),’’ which aims to deliver the latest researchresults to the readers, appears in two issues, 4 and 6,Volume 67, Journal of Oceanography. The special sectionincludes 11 original papers and an introduction paper (Huet al. 2011). The key points are summarized as follows.For the mesoscale dynamics studies, Zheng et al. (2011)analyze the interaction of nonlinear Rossby eddies with theKuroshio at the Luzon Strait using the satellite altimetersea level data from 1993 to 2008, indicating that the eddieswith a radius larger than 150 km are strong enough tosignificantly alter the Kuroshio path and are able to modifythe local circulation pattern. Chen et al. (2011a) extend theKorteweg–de Vries equation to the Benjamin–Ono equa-tion and determine the internal solitary wave amplitude inthe SCS deep basin west of the Luzon Strait from satelliteand in situ measurements.There are two papers focused on studying near-inertialoscillation (NIO) in the SCS. Sun et al. (2011a) observe anNIO burst event in the western SCS by an upward-lookingmooring acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) insummer 2004 and reveal that typhoon ‘‘Chanchu’’ is amajor mechanism to trigger the NIO burst event. Sun et al.(2011b) detect strong NIO from observations of threeADCP moorings in the continental shelf of the northernSCS in July 2008 and find that the NIOs are characterizedby red-shifted frequencies.There are four papers related to the current, upwelling,or water mass in the Taiwan Strait and in the Beibu Gulf.Hong et al. (2011) analyze the observational data andnumerical model results and confirm the two-prongednorthward flow in the southern Taiwan Strait in summer.Qiu et al. (2011) analyze the near surface circulation in theTaiwan Strait using 110 satellite-tracked surface driftersfrom 1989 to 2007, showing that almost all winter driftersthat enter the Taiwan Strait eventually move southward.Using a nested circulation model based on the PrincetonOcean Model, Jiang et al. (2011) investigate the charac-teristics and mechanisms of the Southwest upwelling and