A study of the freshwater discharge from the Amazon River into the tropical Atlantic using multi-sensor data

[1] We study freshwater discharge from the Amazon River into the tropical Atlantic using monthly mean multi-sensor data from September 1997 to July 2003. In order to demonstrate freshwater discharge, we used chlorophyll concentration (Chl_a) and diffuse attenuation coefficient (DAC) measured by the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), and salt steric height anomaly (DhS) derived from Integrated Multi-Sensor Data Analysis (IMSDA). IMSDA was obtained from estimating the long term-time series of DhS by removing the thermal steric height anomaly (h 0 T) from altimetry data. Comparisons of long-term time series of DhS, Chl_a, and DAC were made with mooring data at 8 N, 38 W, which were highly correlated. There are threeto five-month lags between the Amazon River discharge and 4 N latitude estimated from latitude-time diagram derived from SeaWiFS measurements. Citation: Jo, Y.-H., X.-H. Yan, B. Dzwonkowski, and W. T. Liu (2005), A study of the freshwater discharge from the Amazon River into the tropical Atlantic using multi-sensor data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L02605, doi:10.1029/2004GL021840.