Estimating the seaward extent of sea breeze from QuikSCAT scatterometry

Abstract

We present an objective method for quantifying the seaward extent of the sea breeze. The underlying assumption is that the offshore decay in the strength of the sea breeze results in an offshore decay of the vector correlation between the wind vectors near and away from the coast. The degradation in the vector correlation coefficient is used to estimate the seaward extent of the sea breeze using QuikSCAT data. Copyright 2005 by the American Geophysical Union.