Offshore wind farm wakes were observed and photographed in foggy conditions at Horns Rev 2 on 25 January 2016 at 12:45 UTC. These new images show highly contrasting conditions regarding the wind speed, turbulence intensity, atmospheric stability, weather conditions and wind farm wake development as compared to the Horns Rev 1 photographs from 12 February 2008. The paper examines the atmospheric...

Island thermal effects on the trail cloud band over the central North Pacific are investigated for the lee of Hawaii using satellite observations and a regional atmospheric model. The trail cloud band develops around noon and peaks in cloudiness in the early afternoon. The analysis of numerical simulations of the Kauai wake suggests that a dynamically induced convergence zone forms in the lee o...

Upwellings are observed on the northern shelf of Taiwan during northeasterly winds. Analytical and realistic numerical models are used to explain how vertical motions are created by divergence and convergence produced by wind acting on the vorticity field of two strong jets: the Kuroshio and the Taiwan Warm Current. The seaward increase in cyclonic vorticity near the Kuroshio’s western edge fav...

We seek to document and explain the lifecycle of the warm SST anomaly that intensified and weakened off the west coast of the United States to peak anomalies of 4' K during April-June 1997. We use remotely sensed observational data and model analyses to compute an energy budget for the warm anomaly. The bulk of the anomalous warming was confined to the top 50m of ocean and occurred during May. ...

Tropical warm pools appear as the primary mode in the distribution of tropical sea surface temperature (SST). Most previous studies have focused on the role of atmospheric processes in homogenizing temperatures in the warm pool and establishing the observed statistical SST distribution. In this paper, a hierarchy of models is used to illustrate both oceanic and atmospheric mechanisms that contr...

Two ten-members ensemble experiments using a coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model are performed to study the dynamical response to a strong westerly wind event (WWE) when the tropical Pacific has initial conditions favourable to the development of a warm event. In the reference ensemble (CREF), no wind perturbation is introduced, whereas a strong westerly wind event anomaly is int...

The early-to-mid Pliocene (3–5.3 Ma) is the most recent geologic period of significant global warmth. Proxy records of Pliocene sea surface temperature (SST) indicate significant and still unexplained warm anomalies of 3∘C–9∘C in midlatitude eastern boundary currents, where present-day cool temperatures are maintained by wind-driven upwelling. Here we quantify the effect of large-scale Pliocene...

[1] In aerial surveys conducted during the Tropical Ocean–Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment and the low-wind component of the Coupled Boundary Layer Air-Sea Transfer (CBLAST-Low) oceanographic field programs, sea surface temperature (SST) variability at relatively short spatial scales (O(50 m) to O(1 km)) was observed to increase with decreasing wind speed. A unique...