Effects of Spatial Scale Modification on the Responses of Surface Wind Stress to the Thermal Front in the Northern South China Sea

Abstract

The responses of surface wind stress to the mesoscale sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies associated with the SST front in the northern South China Sea (NSCS) are studied using satellite observations and reanalysis data. Both satellite and reanalysis data explicitly show the linear relationships between the spatial-high-pass filtered wind stress perturbation derivatives and the underlying SST gradient field. However, the noise in the linear relationships is much smaller in the reanalysis data than in the satellite observations. This result is rarely reported in other frontal areas. The wavelet analysis shows that the satellite scatterometer observed numerous high wavenumber perturbations within 100 km in the NSCS, but these perturbations were absent in the reanalysis data. The linear relationship between the perturbation SST gradient and derivative wind stress fields is not significant at this scale, which enhances the noise in the linear relationship. The spatial bandpass-filtered perturbation between 100 and 300 km can give reasonable estimates of the coupling coefficients between the wind stress divergence and downwind SST gradient (ad) and between the wind stress curl and crosswind SST gradient (ac) in the NSCS, with values of 1.33 3 1022 and 0.95 3 1022Nm22 8C21, respectively.