Impact of Typhoons on the Western Pacific: Temporal and Horizontal Variability of SST Cooling
Abstract
The long-term goal of this project (now in the first half of the second year of the ITOP program) is to understand how the spatial variation of ocean and hurricane parameters, e.g., upper ocean temperature gradient, initial mixed-layer depth, etc., contribute to hurricane-ocean interaction. With this understanding we should then be in position to make better forecasts of hurricane-ocean interaction, and especially of hurricane intensity, by defining a comparatively simple metric of the ocean's state (stratification, mainly) . The impetus of this research is the observation that hurricanes cool the sea surface temperature (SST) by up to 2 to 5 deg C (Price et al., 1994; Sanford et al., 2007). This SST cooling is observed to vary temporally disappearing in O(10) days, the subject of the previous (CBLAST) research by this PI (Price et al., 2008) - and spatially. The most impressive spatial variation of the cool wake seen behind moving hurricanes is that SST cooling is significantly biassed to the right side of the hurricane track (looking in the direction of the hurricane motion) for translation speeds less than 4 m/sec. There is almost always observed to be a substantial variation of SST cooling in the direction parallel to a hurricane track as well. Factors that could cause this sort of along-track variation of cooling include spatial variation in the pre-hurricane oceanic temperature (and salinity) stratification, and of course spatial variation of the hurricane intensity and translation speed. This along-track variation has been a focus of this project.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA527191
Entities
People
- James F. Price
Organizations
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution