Wednesday, 16 January 2002: 2:15 PM
Surface turbulent heat fluxes over the Atlantic Ocean synthesized from satellite measurements and NWP model analyses
The accuracy of surface turbulent heat flux fields depends on the quality of basic variables and on the reality of bulk aerodynamic formulas used to compute the fluxes. We will present a set of gridded daily surface turbulent heat fluxes in the Atlantic basin for 1988-1999 developed by applying the state-of-the-art TOGA COARE flux algorithm to the bulk variables, each of which is synthesized using the variational analysis method from in situ estimates, satellite measurements and NWP model analyses. The uncertainties on the input datasets, which influence the weights of the terms consisting of the cost functional in the variational analysis scheme, are estimated through comparing those input datasets with high-quality research buoy and ship data collected from a wide range of climate regimes of the Atlantic. The accuracy of our synthesized product is examined against the independent in situ measurements and the climate applications of our product is also discussed.
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