Ocean bottom friction coefficient from SEASAT‐ALT data (Hudson Bay)

Abstract

Ocean bottom frictional coupling has been a complex yet very important problem in global geodynamics. However, due to the logistic difficulties involved, the ocean bottom friction coefficient database has been very sparse and the available data, often from a limited number of installations, represent only a very small number of regions. In this study, a hydrodynamic modelling technique (numerical approach) is extended to accept atmospheric data interactively and the resulting transient sea‐surface height information is correlated with the SEASAT‐ALT data sets over the Hudson Bay area of Canada. A least squares fitting of the corrected SEASAT‐ALT data to the theoretically computed sea‐surface profiles then allows us to estimate the ocean bottom coupling coefficients. The representative values for the linear and quadratic ocean bottom friction coefficients are 0.255 and 0.00234 cm s‐1 respectively. Copyright © 1987, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved