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Abstract
This study investigates the sensitivity of the Sverdrup transport to the NCEP/NCAR, ERA-Interim, CCMP, and QSCAT wind products over the tropical North Pacific Ocean during the period of 2000–2008. Our analyses show that all of the S-E transports in the reanalysis/analysis winds are northward in the band of 7–9° N except the QSCAT wind, which produces more realistic southward transport as shown in the meridional geostrophic transports (MGTs) calculated from WOA13 and Argo data. At 24° N, high-resolution wind products can better estimate the meridional transport in this region. At 8° N, although the CCMP has the same high resolution as the QSCAT, it fails to produce more realistic ocean circulation just as the coarse resolution wind products do there. The unrealistically large wind stress curl and small zonal wind stress in winter in reanalysis/analysis wind products account for this discrepancy with the QSCAT. This discrepancy also suggests that the model physics used in these reanalysis wind products is deficient in depicting the ocean circulation in this region, where the ocean fronts and eddy activity are both active.
Highlights
Our understanding of the mean meridional transports of the ocean is based on Sverdrup theory (Sverdrup 1947), which obtains the meridional transport of the wind-driven ocean circulation by integrating the wind stress curl (WSC) without detailed information of the oceanic baroclinicity under a linear dynamic assumption
We first compare the WSCs calculated from observational and reanalysis/analysis wind products, and we investigate the sensitivity of Sverdrup transport to these wind products over the tropical North Pacific Ocean
Ocean is calculated by integrating the meridional geostrophic velocities from the eastern boundary to the 5° off the coast in the western boundary in order to avoid the influence of the Mindanao Current (MC) and the Mindanao eddy (ME), which represents the meridional volume transport in interior Ocean
Summary
Our understanding of the mean meridional transports of the ocean is based on Sverdrup theory (Sverdrup 1947), which obtains the meridional transport of the wind-driven ocean circulation by integrating the wind stress curl (WSC) without detailed information of the oceanic baroclinicity under a linear dynamic assumption. Studies (Spillane and Niiler 1975; Wyrtki 1975; Meyers 1980) have shown that the Sverdrup transport calculated from 2 to 5° latitude grid wind stress data does not account for the Pacific North Equatorial Countercurrent (NECC) They attribute the discrepancy to strong vorticity advection and lateral mixing near the current boundaries, where the meridional shear is large. The temporal record of remote sensing wind data is less than 30 years, which is not suitable for long-term climate study For this reason, over the past decade, reanalysis/analysis wind products have found widespread application in many areas of research ranging from studies of climatic trends and climate modeling (Bromwich and Fogt 2004; Decker et al 2012).
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