Abstract
Ocean surface winds, currents, and waves play a crucial role in exchanges of momentum, energy, heat, freshwater, gases, and other tracers between the ocean, atmosphere, and ice. Despite surface waves being strongly coupled to the upper ocean circulation and the overlying atmosphere, efforts to improve ocean, atmospheric, and wave observations and models have evolved somewhat independently. From an observational point of view, community efforts to bridge this gap have led to proposals for satellite Doppler oceanography mission concepts, which could provide unprecedented measurements of absolute surface velocity and directional wave spectrum at global scales. This paper reviews the present state of observations of surface winds, currents, and waves, and it outlines observational gaps that limit our current understanding of coupled processes that happen at the air-sea-ice interface. A significant challenge for the coming decade of wind, current, and wave observations will come in combining and interpreting measurements from (a) wave-buoys and high-frequency radars in coastal regions, (b) surface drifters and wave-enabled drifters in the open-ocean, marginal ice zones, and wave-current interaction ``hot-spots'', and (c) simultaneous measurements of absolute surface currents, ocean surface wind vector, and directional wave spectrum from Doppler satellite sensors.
Highlights
The Earth’s climate is regulated by the energetic balance between ocean, atmosphere, ice, and land
The buoys most commonly used for validating satellite wind retrievals are the tropical moored buoy arrays (TAO/Triangle Trans-Ocean Buoy Network (TRITON) in the Pacific, the PIRATA array in the Atlantic, and the RAMA array in the Indian Ocean), the network of buoys maintained by the US National Data Buoy Center (NDBC), the handful of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ocean Reference Station buoys, and the coastal buoys maintained by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Wentz et al, 2017)
Satellite Altimetry Over the last 25 years, the most exploited system for the monitoring of ocean surface currents for ice-free global scale has been altimetry. This is due to the fact that the flow in the ocean interior and away from the equator is to leading order in geostrophic balance, which means that the ocean surface velocity field can be readily obtained from the gradients of the ocean dynamic topography
Summary
The Earth’s climate is regulated by the energetic balance between ocean, atmosphere, ice, and land. Into the ocean interior, with the ultimate aim of developing improved parameterizations of these processes for operational monitoring and Earth system models used for predicting future climate In this context, a significant challenge for the decade will be to combine and interpret measurements of wind, currents, and waves from existing in situ and remote sensing observational platforms with new measurements from future Doppler oceanography satellites, in a modeling framework that constantly evolves toward finer spatial and temporal resolutions and increasingly complex coupled systems.
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