HR: 09:55h
AN: OS11O-06 [PDF]
TI: Coastal Upwelling Response to Atmospheric Wind Forcing along the Pacific Coast of the United States.
AU: * Penven, P
EM: penven@atmos.ucla.edu
AF: IGPP, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567
United States
AU: McWilliams, J C
EM: jcm@atmos.ucla.edu
AF: IGPP, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567
United States
AU: Marchesiello, P
EM: patrickm@atmos.ucla.edu
AF: IGPP, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567
United States
AU: Chao, Y
EM: yc@pacific.jpl.nasa.gov
AF: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109
United States
AB:
Wind stress is recognized as the most important driving force
for coastal upwelling. Along the West Coast of the United States,
although wind stress is mainly directed towards the equator,
i.e. favorable to upwelling, it shows important spatial and
temporal variations.
A model of the Central California Upwelling System has
been developed to assess the ocean response to different
wind forcings.
A nesting capability has been integrated into the Regional
Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) to obtain local solutions at high
resolution while preserving the large-scale circulation at
affordable computational cost. It has been applied to a
domain that covers the central upwelling region of the United
States West Coast, around Monterey Bay, embedded into a domain
including the whole US Pacific Coast. Long term simulations
(10 years) have been conducted to get yearly cyclic statistical
equilibria.
Several simulations are performed, forced by different monthly
mean wind stress climatologies: COADS, NCEP, QuickSCAT and COAMPS.
The spatial sampling of these data-sets ranges from more than 100 kilometers for COADS and NCEP to 9 kilometers for COAMPS.
While on the large scale these winds are relatively similar, they show important variations in the Coastal Transition Zone.
In particular, COAMPS winds present strong and narrow gradients in the near-shore region which are not resolved by the other
products. The model experiments show large sensitivities of coastal upwelling and even large-scale circulation to the spatial
structure of the wind forcing at intermediate scales (tens to hundreds of kilometers).
DE: 3339 Ocean/atmosphere interactions (0312, 4504)
DE: 4255 Numerical modeling
DE: 4279 Upwelling and convergences
DE: 4516 Eastern boundary currents
DE: 4528 Fronts and jets
SC: OS
MN: 2002 Ocean Sciences Meeting