Climate Atlas of the Atlantic Ocean: Derived from the Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (Coads

by Lindau, R.

• ISBN13: 9783540668138
• ISBN10: 3540668136
• Edition: CD
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-10-01
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

Summary

The growing interest in climate and climatic change has renewed the demand for climate descriptions of the world oceans. Fields of climate variables are used as boundary conditions, or sea truth, for atmospheric and oceanic models and coupled models of the atmosphere-ocean system. The rapid improvements that modeling has made in recent years also call for more detailed descriptions of processes at the air-sea interface. The climate atlas presented here is restricted to the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic is of special interest for two reasons: The cross-equatorial ocean heat transport is an outstanding climatic feature which contributes to the high sea-surface temperatures in the Northeastern North Atlantic and the mild climate of Europe.
From a more technical point of view, the data coverage of the Atlantic is much denser than for other parts of the world oceans. Hence, the Atlantic can well serve as a reliable test area of sea truth for both modeling and satellite remote sensing.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Data and Data Treatment	p. 1
Derivation of Air-Sea Fluxes by Parameterisations	p. 2
Net Air-Sea Heat Flux and Meridional Heat Transport	p. 12
Concluding Remarks	p. 16
References	p. 17
Observations	p. 19
Time-Latitude Diagrams	p. 21
Annual Cycles at Selected Locations	p. 26
Observation Density	p. 47
Sea Surface Temperature	p. 53
Air Temperature	p. 73
Air minus Sea Surface Temperature	p. 80
Mixing Ratio	p. 100
Relative Humidity	p. 120
Air minus Sea Surface Mixing Ratio	p. 127
Total Cloud Cover	p. 134
Low Cloud Cover	p. 149
Precipitation Frequency	p. 156
Sea Level Air Pressure	p. 171
Scalar Wind Speed plus Resultant Wind Vector	p. 191
East Component of the Wind	p. 211
North Component of the Wind	p. 231
Magnitude of Resultant Wind plus Resultant Wind Vector	p. 251
Direction of the Mean Wind Vector	p. 258
Directional Steadiness of the Wind	p. 264
Divergence of Wind	p. 271
Air-Sea Interactions	p. 279
Time-Latitude Diagrams	p. 281
Annual Cycles at Selected Locations	p. 285
Net Shortwave Radiation	p. 306
Net Longwave Radiation	p. 321
Net Radiation	p. 336
Latent Heat Flux	p. 343
Evaporation	p. 358
Sensible Heat Flux	p. 365
Total Net Air-Sea Heat Flux	p. 380
Wind Stress	p. 395
East Component to the Wind Stress	p. 410
North Component of the Wind Stress	p. 425
Curl of Wind Stress	p. 440
Ekman Volume Transport	p. 455
Vertical Ekman Velocity	p. 470
Sverdrup Transport	p. 477
Streamfunction of Sverdrup Transport	p. 483
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