We study the wind climate and its long-term variability in the North Sea and South China Sea, areas relevant for offshore wind energy development, using satellite-based wind data, because very few reliable long-term in-situ sea surface wind observations are available. The Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) ocean winds extrapolated from 10 m to 100 m using the Charnock relationship and the ...

Four years of ocean vector wind data are used to evaluate statistics of wind stress over the ocean. Raw swath wind stresses derived from the Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) are compared with five different global gridded wind products, including products based on scatterometer observations, meteorological analysis winds from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and reanalysis ...

We revisit the occurrence condition of optically thick winds reported by Kato (1985) and Kato & Hachisu (1989) who examined mathematically nova envelope solutions with an old opacity and found that optically thick winds are accelerated only in massive white dwarfs (WDs) of & 0.9 M⊙. With the OPAL opacity we find that the optically thick wind occurs for & 0.6 M⊙ WDs and that the occurrence of wi...

During the summer months, when northerly winds are blowing over the Aegean Sea the island of Crete modifies significantly the regional airflow as well as the pressure and temperature fields due to its complex topography. One of the major topographical elements of Crete Island is the major gap which is located between the two highest mountains Lefka Ori and Idi. On 24–25 August 2007 strong north...

[1] Previous work has suggested that the strength and latitudinal position of the Southern Hemisphere (SH) midlatitude westerly winds has an important impact on climate and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). We probe this hypothesis by conducting ensembles of experiments using the GFDL CM2.1 coupled ocean-atmosphere model with altered SH wind stress. We find, consistent wit...

[1] An Earth System model is used to explore the response of the oceanic and terrestrial carbon sinks to strengthening and poleward shifting of the extratropical Southern Hemisphere winds, which is a robust feature of climate models’ response to greenhouse gas forcing through the 20th and 21st centuries. We find that under time-varying CO2 emissions poleward intensifying Southern Hemisphere win...

This paper shows that the synoptic variability of zonal and meridional midlatitude Pacific and Southern Ocean sea surface winds can be well described by a univariate stochastic dynamical system directly derived from data. The method used to analyze blended Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT)–NCEP winds is a general method to estimate drift and diffusion coefficients of a continuous stationary Markov...

[1] Telescopic observations and space missions to Jupiter have provided vast information about Jupiter’s cloud level winds, but the depth to which these winds penetrate has remained an ongoing mystery. Scheduled to be launched in 2011, the Jupiter orbiter Juno will make high-resolution observations of Jupiter’s gravity field. In this paper we show that these measurements are sensitive to the de...

Five years of wind observations taken by the research vessel C.C.G.S. Porte Dauphine on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have been compared to simultaneous observations taken a t land stations upwind of the ship. The resultant ratios of over-lake winds/over-land winds have been sorted by speed classes, conditions of atmospheric stability, and the length of the over-water fetch to assess the relative ...