Estimating typhoon-induced sea surface cooling based upon satellite observations

Abstract

Typhoons frequently occur in the summer in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, and the responses of the upper ocean to typhoons have drawn extensive attention for decades. In the present work, a modified grid-based maximum response (GMR) method was proposed to estimate the sea surface cooling (SSC) caused by typhoons. The current algorithm (CA) is different from the original GMR method mainly in two aspects: (1) it uses a 5 day average rather than a 2 day average of the sea surface temperature (SST) before the typhoon as the reference temperature; (2) it modifies the fixed radius of 400 km to the level-7 Beaufort scale wind-force (~17.1 m/s) radius to determine the area where the SSC should be calculated. Then the MW-IR OISST data derived from satellite observations were used to compare the SSC estimated by different algorithms in four typhoon cases, Megi, LionRock, Trami and KongRey. The results show that, in all cases, maximum response methods have approached similar results, while the others seemed to have underestimated the SSC in degrees. In the slow-moving LionRock case, grid-based methods were found to have better performance, while in the successive typhoon cases, Trami and KongRey, CA showed an improved result in representing the pre-existing sea surface status before the typhoon KongRey by using the pentad mean SST as the reference temperature. In addition, the use of level-7 wind-force coverage made the results much livelier. In a word, the algorithm proposed here is valid in general. It has advantages in estimating the SSC caused by both slow-moving typhoons and successive typhoons, and should be further applied to related research.