Abstract
Abstract. Air-Sea exchange of momentum, heat and moisture over the oceanic surface plays an important role in understanding several processes spanning various scales of atmospheric and oceanic motions. The present study provides estimates of air-sea exchange parameters along the cruise track of the Intensive Field Phase of Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX, IFP-99) conducted on board Oceanic Research Vessel (ORV) Sagar Kanya during 20 January–12 March 1999 for a large region of the Indian Ocean. The study is aimed at acquiring a better understanding of the wind speed dependence of air-sea interaction parameters, such as roughness lengths for wind (z0), temperature (z0t) and hu-midity (z0q), which play a key role in the determination of the air-sea exchange coefficients and interface fluxes across the tropical oceans. The variation of drag coefficient (CD), sensible heat and water vapor exchange coefficients (CH and CE), are also discussed in relation to the wind speed. An empirical relation is derived between the estimated values of drag coefficients and the observed values of wind speeds for the hitherto data-sparse regions over the tropical Indian Ocean.Key words. Oceanography: physical (air-sea interaction) Meteorology and atmospheric dynamics (ocean-atmosphere interaction) – Oceanography: physical (marine meteorology)
Highlights
An important component of marine meteorological research is the determination of energy balance components at the oceanic surface through the estimation of air-sea exchange of momentum, heat and water vapor
Since the aim of this paper is to study the wind speed dependence of air-sea exchange parameters, we present the spatio-temporal variation of these parameters along the cruise track with the variation of wind speed
Airsea exchange parameters of water vapor, heat and momentum are important inputs for mesoscale and GCM modeling. These are lacking over the tropical oceans
Summary
An important component of marine meteorological research is the determination of energy balance components at the oceanic surface through the estimation of air-sea exchange of momentum, heat and water vapor. Large et al (1994) presented a detailed survey on the available schemes to represent a vertical mixing scheme that can be developed into a suitable oceanic boundary layer model for climate studies and detailed a K Profile Parameterization (KPP) model and its successes (Troen and Mahrt, 1986). They reviewed the model and suggested further developments for the KPP model. The present study is aimed at studying the wind speed dependence of air-sea exchange coefficients of momentum, heat and moisture, crucial for the
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