Quality of wind stress fields measured by the skill of a barotropic ocean model: Importance of stability of the Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer

Abstract

The stability of the Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer (MABL) plays an important role in the air-sea exchange of momentum. Hence MABL's stability has an impact on the performance of numerical ocean models, which are driven by wind stress (along with other forcings). Here we investigate the effect of three wind stress parameterizations on the ability of a barotropic model to fit sea-level measurements from the US-French satellite TOPEX/POSEIDON (TP). We show that the wind stress parameterization that takes into account the stability of MABL enhances the model's skill to fit the TP data. Because the ocean shows a barotropic response primarily in high latitudes, the model's gain in skill is also in the high latitudes, where the probability of the MABL being unstable is in the 50% to 70% range.