85th AMS Annual Meeting

Wednesday, 12 January 2005
Integrated observation of upper ocean response to typhoons and tropical storms from ARGO floats and Satellites
JongJin Park, Seoul National Univeristy, Seoul, South Korea; and K. A. Park, K. Kim, and Y. H. Youn
Profile data from ARGO floats enable us to understand air-sea exchange of heat and fresh water during passage of typhoons and tropical storms in the North Pacific during the period 2000-2003. We made about 750 match-up ARGO profiles before and after passage of the storms within ±10 days and 200 km distance from the typhoon center. Comparisons of the pre and post profile pairs demonstrate that the storms produce temperature cooling of 1.0 oC and salinity freshening of 0.12 psu on average in the ocean mixed layer (ML). It is noted that the temperature cooling case and salinity freshening case are dominant by about 89 % and about 78 % of all the matching profiles, respectively. About 60 % of the profiles show deepening of the ML during typhoon passage while in the other cases the ML remained the same or shoaled. We found that the change of ocean mixed layer depth (MLD) is negatively correlated with the initial value of the MLD prior to arrival of storm. The salinity freshening in the ML has a positive correlation (with statistical significance of 99 %) with the temperature cooling under weak wind gust (less than 30 m/s), whereas has a negative correlation under the strong wind gust (more than 50 m/s). We have also investigated other oceanic and meteorological parameters associated with characteristics of the typhoon, such as precipitation, evaporation, and sea surface wind, using various satellite data from NOAA/AVHRR, geostationary satellite (GOES), QuikSCAT, Aqua/AMSR-E, TRMM, and etc.

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