Variations of mesoscale eddy SST fronts based on an automatic detection method in the northern South China Sea
- PDF / 2,309,350 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595 x 842 pts (A4) Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 167 Views
Variations of mesoscale eddy SST fronts based on an automatic detection method in the northern South China Sea Chunhua Qiu1, 2*, Juan Ouyang1, Jiancheng Yu3, Huabin Mao4, Yongfeng Qi4, Jiaxue Wu1, 2*, Danyi Su1 1 School of Marine Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China 2 Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai 519020, China 3 State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang
110016, China 4 State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Guangzhou 510301, China Received 15 March 2020; accepted 22 July 2020 © Chinese Society for Oceanography and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
SST fronts at the mesoscale eddy edge (ME fronts) were investigated from 2007–2017 in the northern South China Sea (NSCS) based on an automatic method using satellite sea level anomaly (SLA) and SST data. The relative probabilities between the number of anticyclonic/cyclonic ME fronts (AEF/CEF) and the number of anticyclones/cyclones reached 20%. The northeastern and southwestern parts of these anticyclones had more fronts than the northwestern and southeastern parts, although CEFs were nearly equally distributed in all directions. The number of ME fronts had remarkable seasonal variations, while the eddy kinetic energy (EKE) showed no seasonal variations. The total EKE at the ME fronts was three times of that within the MEs, and it was much stronger in AEFs than in CEFs. The interannual variability in the number of ME fronts and EKE had no significant correlation with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index. Possible mechanisms of ME fronts were discussed, but the contributions of mesoscale eddies to SST fronts need to be quantified in future studies. Key words: detection method, mesoscale eddy SST front, northern South China Sea Citation: Qiu Chunhua, Ouyang Juan, Yu Jiancheng, Mao Huabin, Qi Yongfeng, Wu Jiaxue, Su Danyi. 2020. Variations of mesoscale eddy SST fronts based on an automatic detection method in the northern South China Sea. Acta Oceanologica Sinica, doi: 10.1007/s13131-0201669-y
1 Introduction Oceanic fronts, or transition zones between water masses, play important roles in regulating oceanic heat, energy, and matter balances through associated vertical transport (Lévy et al., 2001; Ruiz et al., 2019). They also influence the atmospheric boundary layer (Xie, 2004). The observation and modeling of oceanic fronts are topics of interest in oceanography. The South China Sea (SCS) is a large marginal sea in the tropical western Pacific Ocean. The complex topography and monsoon allow multiscale oceanic structures to prevail in the SCS; these include branches of the Kuroshio Current and the SCS Warm Current as well as western boundary currents, mesoscale eddies (MEs), river plumes, upwelling, and submesoscale structures (Hu et al., 2012; Yuan et al., 2006; Zhong et al., 2017; Feng et al., 2020). Fronts have b
Data Loading...
