Abstract
Abstract. The Southern Ocean has a profound impact on the Earth's climate system. Its strong winds, intense currents, and fierce waves are critical components of the air–sea interface and contribute to absorbing, storing, and releasing heat, moisture, gases, and momentum. Owing to its remoteness and harsh environment, this region is significantly undersampled, hampering the validation of prediction models and large-scale observations from satellite sensors. Here, an unprecedented data set of simultaneous observations of winds, surface currents, and ocean waves is presented, to address the scarcity of in situ observations in the region – https://doi.org/10.26179/5ed0a30aaf764 (Alberello et al., 2020c) and https://doi.org/10.26179/5e9d038c396f2 (Derkani et al., 2020). Records were acquired underway during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE), which went around the Southern Ocean from December 2016 to March 2017 (Austral summer). Observations were obtained with the wave and surface current monitoring system WaMoS-II, which scanned the ocean surface around the vessel using marine radars. Measurements were assessed for quality control and compared against available satellite observations. The data set is the most extensive and comprehensive collection of observations of surface processes for the Southern Ocean and is intended to underpin improvements of wave prediction models around Antarctica and research of air–sea interaction processes, including gas exchange and dynamics of sea spray aerosol particles. The data set has further potentials to support theoretical and numerical research on lower atmosphere, air–sea interface, and upper-ocean processes.
Highlights
The Southern Ocean comprises an uninterrupted band of water around Antarctica south of the 60th parallel
Sea state observations were recorded with the wave and surface current monitoring system WaMoS-II
The method relies on the principle that the vessel is a rigid body with six degrees of freedom that moves in response to the incident wave field expressed as the frequency spectrum S(f ) = E(f, θ) dθ and restoring forces expressed as a function of its mass, geometry, loading conditions, and forward speed, among other parameters (Newman, 2018)
Summary
The Southern Ocean comprises an uninterrupted band of water around Antarctica south of the 60th parallel. Sea ice extent around Antarctica impacts albedo, atmospheric and thermohaline circulation, and ocean productivity (Perovich et al, 2008; Massom and Stammerjohn, 2010; Notz, 2012), contributing to the heat balance It attenuates waves, modulating air–sea fluxes and mixing (Thomas et al, 2019). The scarcity of in situ observations has a negative feedback on the satellite network, which cannot rely on sufficient ground truth to be validated with high confidence This drawback impacts prediction models, which are impaired by notable biases in the Southern Ocean (see, for example, Yuan, 2004; Li et al, 2013; Zieger et al, 2015).
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