This study examines the extent to which sea level variations at periods less than a year and spatial scales greater than 1000 km can be described by the wind-driven linear barotropic vorticity dynamics. The TOPEX/POSEIDON altimetric observations of sea level and the wind products of the National Meteorological Center are used as the database for the study. Each term of the linear bamtropic vort...

Representation of surface roughness effects on aeolian sediment transport is a key source of uncertainty in wind erosion models. Drag partitioning schemes are used to account for roughness by scaling the soil entrainment threshold by the ratio of shear stress on roughness elements to that on the vegetated land surface. This approach does not explicitly account for the effects of roughness confi...

The dynamics of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (SPG) are assessed under present and glacial boundary conditions by investigating the SPG sensitivity to surface wind-stress changes in a coupled climate model. To this end, the gyre transport is decomposed in Ekman, thermohaline, and bottom transports. Surface wind-stress variations are found to play an important indirect role in SPG dynamics th...

The transport of sand in saltation is driven by the persistently unsteady stresses exerted by turbulent winds. Based on coupled high-frequency observations of wind velocity and sand flux on a desert dune during intermittent saltation, we show here how observations of saltation by natural winds depend significantly on the timescale and method used for determining shear stress and sand flux. The ...

[1] Understanding and quantifying the multiscale interactions between surface shear stress and velocity in the boundary layer is essential to improving boundary condition parameterizations used in numerical models of turbulent boundary layers. In this study, high-frequencymeasurements obtained in a wind tunnel are used to identify dominant scales of interaction (quantified in terms of scale-dep...

Model studies of the Southern Ocean, reported here, show that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current responds within two days to changes in the zonal wind stress at the latitudes of Drake Passage. Further investigation shows that the response is primarily barotropic and that, as one might expect, it is controlled by topography. Analysis of the results show that the changes in the barotropic flow are...

The effect of the position of the Southern Hemisphere subpolar westerly winds (SWWs) on the thermohaline circulation (THC) of the World Ocean is examined. The latitudes of zero wind stress curl position exert a strong control on the distribution of overturning between basins in the Northern Hemisphere. A southward wind shift results in a stronger Atlantic THC and enhanced stratification in the ...

Experiments with the coupled climate model CLIMBER-3a, which contains an oceanic general circulation model, show deep upwelling in the Southern Ocean to be proportional to the surface wind stress in the latitudinal band of Drake Passage. At the same time, the distribution of the Southern Ocean upwelling onto the oceanic basins is controlled by buoyancy distribution; the inflow into each basin b...

It is shown that when the wind distribution along a coast is anisotropic, such that its cross-shore scale is smaller than its alongshore scale, the coastal sea level (or the upper layer anamoly) “A” of an ocean forced by both wind and wind curl is governed by a modified (nondimensionalized) Kelvin wave equation: ­A/­t* 1 ­A/­ y* 5 k0(0, y*, t*) 1 * ­k1/­ y* dtL where k0 and k1 are wind stress a...