[1] A wind-wave flume is used to determine the extent to which the thermal boundary layer (TBL) at a wind-forced air-water interface is completely renewed from below. We measure skin temperature, Tskin, radiometrically, temperature immediately below the TBL, Tsubskin, using a temperature profiler, and net heat flux using the gradient flux technique. The Tskin probability density function, p(Tsk...

We examine processes that influence North Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies including surface heat fluxes, upper ocean mixing, thermocline variability, ocean currents, and tropical-extratropical interactions via the atmosphere and ocean. The ocean integrates rapidly varying atmospheric heat flux and wind forcing, and thus a stochastic model of the climate system, where white noise...

Because of their high wind gradient structures, tropical cyclones (TC’s) present a major challenge to space-borne scatterometer measurements of ocean surface wind vectors. Frequently spiral bands of strong rains accompany the high winds, and this precipitation attenuates the ocean backscatter due to wind. Also scattering by the rain volume increases the backscatter measured by the scatterometer...

Lagged maximum covariance analysis (LMCA) is used to examine the intraseasonal variability of zonal wind, sea surface temperature (SST), and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) in the northeastern tropical Pacific Ocean during Northern Hemisphere summertime. The analysis shows a strong temporal asymmetry in that wind and convection anomalies lead to SST anomalies, but SST anomalies are not follow...

Wind sensors are widely used in many critical applications, such as navigation, weather forecast, aerospace and wind energy assessment. The thermal wind sensor can measure wind speed and direction at the same time, by measuring the temperature gradient on the sensor's surface which is induced by the wind flow. Compared to traditional mechanical wind sensors, there are two main advantages for th...

Both rainfall and wind have acoustic signatures that can be discerned at depths in the ocean well below the sea surface. We examine observations of rainfall and wind speed collected at a depth of 600 m in the Bay of Bengal from a specially modified Argo profiling float. In addition to the normal Argo sensors, the float carried a passive acoustic listener sensor package that monitored the spectr...

A four-dimensional variational method has been developed that assimilates XBT and TAO sub-surface temperature data into the Hamburg Ocean Primitive Equation model. The method decreases the misfit between model and observed ocean temperatures by adjusting the surface forcing. The main goal of the assimilation scheme is to improve ocean analyses in the tropical Pacific. As a first study, only win...

We present ocean model sensitivity experiments aimed at separating the influence of the projected changes in the ‘‘thermal’’ (near-surface air temperature) and ‘‘wind’’ (near-surface winds) forcing on the patterns of sea level and ocean heat content. In the North Atlantic, the distribution of sea level change is more due to the ‘‘thermal’’ forcing, whereas it is more due to the ‘‘wind’’ forcing...

We examine 800-year time series of internally generated variability in both a coupled ocean-atmosphere model where water vapor anomalies are not allowed to interact with longwave radiation and one where they are. The ENSO-like phenomenon in the experiment without water vapor feedback is drastically suppressed both in amplitude and geographic extent relative to the experiment with water vapor fe...