The formation of wind curl in the marine atmosphere boundary layer over the East China Sea Kuroshio in spring

Abstract

Various data are used to investigate the characteristics of the surface wind field and rainfall on the East China Sea Kuroshio (ESK) in March and April, 2011. In March, the wind speed maximum shows over the ESK front (ESKF) in the 10 meter wind field, which agrees with the thermal wind effect. A wind curl center is generated on the warm flank of the ESKF. The winds are much weaker in April, so is the wind curl. A rainband exists over the ESKF in both the months. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used for further researches. The winds on the top of the marine atmosphere boundary layer (MABL) indicate that in March, a positive wind curl is generated in the whole MABL over the warm flank of the ESKF. The thermal wind effect forced by the strong SST gradient overlying the background wind leads to strong surface northeasterly winds on the ESKF, and a positive shearing vorticity is created over the warm flank of the ESKF to generate wind curl. In the smoothed sea surface temperature experiment, the presence of the ESKF is responsible for the strong northeast winds in the ESKF, and essential for the distribution of the rainfall centers in March, which confirms the mechanism above. The same simulation is made for April, 2011, and the responses from the MABL become weak. The low background wind speed weakens the effect of the thermal wind, thus no strong Ekman pumping is helpful for precipitation. There is no big difference in rainfall between the control run and the smooth SST run. Decomposition of the wind vector shows that local wind acceleration induced by the thermal wind effect along with the variations in wind direction is responsible for the pronounced wind curl/divergence over the ESKF.