Rossby waves in the Pacific Ocean extracted from Geosat altimeter data

Abstract

Two years of continuous Geosat altimetry data were used here to extract the signature of Rossby waves from the entire Pacific Ocean. This relatively long time series of global data presents an excellent opportunity to examine the surface expression of large-scale ocean phenomena such as Rossby waves. For this analysis the Pacific Ocean was divided into 10-degree aquare regions, and Rossby waves defined by the Rossby wave dispersion relation were fit to the Geosat data in each region. Rossby waves fit to each 10-degree region were separated by Fourier components in wavenumber space, with frequencies determined by the dispersion relation. Barotropic and first mode baroclinic Rossby waves were fit separately to the Geosat data. Rossby wave amplitudes from the least-squares fit were plotted in wavenumber space. -from Authors