VARIABILITY OF SURFACE TURBULENT FLUXES OVER THE INDIAN OCEAN

A new objective technique is used to analyze monthly mean gridded fields of air and sea temperature, wind, specific humidity, sensible and latent heat flux, and wind stress over the Indian Ocean. A variational method produces a 1°x1° gridded product of surface turbulent fluxes and the variables needed to calculate these fluxes. The surface turbulent fluxes are forced to be physically consistent with the observed variables. The variational method incorporates a state of the art flux model (Bourassa 2005), which should reduce regional biases in heat and moisture fluxes. The time series starts in January 1978 and is ongoing. Spatial/temporal variability of surface turbulent fluxes is evaluated.