Identification of sea surface temperature (SST) variability areas through a statistical approach using remote sensing and numerical ocean model data

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesus Loeches ◽  
Raul Vicen-Bueno ◽  
Giuliana Pennucci ◽  
Aniello Russo
2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (22) ◽  
pp. 8710-8727 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asmi M. Napitu ◽  
Arnold L. Gordon ◽  
Kandaga Pujiana

Abstract Sea surface temperature (SST) variability at intraseasonal time scales across the Indonesian Seas during January 1998–mid-2012 is examined. The intraseasonal variability is most energetic in the Banda and Timor Seas, with a standard deviation of 0.4°–0.5°C, representing 55%–60% of total nonseasonal SST variance. A slab ocean model demonstrates that intraseasonal air–sea heat flux variability, largely attributed to the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO), accounts for 69%–78% intraseasonal SST variability in the Banda and Timor Seas. While the slab ocean model accurately reproduces the observed intraseasonal SST variations during the northern winter months, it underestimates the summer variability. The authors posit that this is a consequence of a more vigorous cooling effect induced by ocean processes during the summer. Two strong MJO cycles occurred in late 2007–early 2008, and their imprints were clearly evident in the SST of the Banda and Timor Seas. The passive phase of the MJO [enhanced outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and weak zonal wind stress) projects on SST as a warming period, while the active phase (suppressed OLR and westerly wind bursts) projects on SST as a cooling phase. SST also displays significant intraseasonal variations in the Sulawesi Sea, but these differ in characteristics from those of the Banda and Timor Seas and are attributed to ocean eddies and atmospheric processes independent from the MJO.


2015 ◽  
Vol 143 (8) ◽  
pp. 3156-3175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wanqiu Wang ◽  
Arun Kumar ◽  
Joshua Xiouhua Fu ◽  
Meng-Pai Hung

Abstract This study investigated the influence of the uncertainty in the sea surface temperature (SST) on the representation of the intraseasonal rainfall variability associated with the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) and how this influence varies with convection parameterization. The study was motivated by the fact that there exist substantial differences in observational SST analyses, and by the possibility that lacking sufficient accuracy for SSTs in dynamical models may degrade the MJO simulation and prediction. Experiments for the DYNAMO intensive observing period were carried out using the NCEP atmospheric Global Forecast System (GFS) with three convection schemes forced by three SST specifications. The SST specifications included the widely used National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) daily SST analysis, the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) SST retrieval, and an SST climatology that only contains climatological seasonal cycle. The experiments show that for all convection schemes, the advantage of using observed (TMI and NCDC) SSTs over the climatology SSTs can be seen as early as 5 days to 1 week after the start of the forecast. Further, the prediction with TMI SSTs was more skillful than that with the NCDC SSTs, indicating that the current level of SST uncertainties in the observational analyses can lead to large differences when they are used as the lower boundary conditions. The results suggest that the simulation and prediction can be improved with an atmosphere-only model forced by more accurate SSTs, or with a coupled atmosphere–ocean model that has a more realistic representation of the SST variability. Differences in the prediction among the convection schemes are also presented and discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 2431
Author(s):  
Yasumasa Miyazawa ◽  
Sergey M. Varlamov ◽  
Toru Miyama ◽  
Yukio Kurihara ◽  
Hiroshi Murakami ◽  
...  

We have developed an ocean state nowcast/forecast system (JCOPE-T DA) that targets the coastal waters around Japan and assimilates daily remote sensing and in situ data. The ocean model component is developed based on the Princeton Ocean Model with a generalized sigma coordinate and calculates oceanic conditions with a 1/36-degree (2–3 km) resolution and an hourly result output interval. To effectively represent oceanic phenomena with a spatial scale smaller than 100 km, we adopted a data assimilation scheme that explicitly separates larger and smaller horizontal scales from satellite sea surface temperature data. Our model is updated daily through data assimilation using the latest available remote-sensing data. Here we validate the data assimilation products of JCOPE-T DA using various kinds of in situ observational data. This validation proves that the JCOPE-T DA model output outperforms those of a previous version of JCOPE-T, which is based on nudging the values of temperature and salinity toward those provided by a different coarse grid data-assimilated model JCOPE2M. Parameter sensitivity experiments show that the selection of horizontal scale separation parameters considerably affects the representation of sea surface temperature. Additional experiments demonstrate that the assimilation of daily-updated satellite sea surface temperature data actually improves the model’s efficiency in representing typhoon-induced disturbances of sea surface temperature on a time scale of a few days. Assimilation of additional in situ data, such as temperature/salinity/ocean current information, further improves the model’s ability to represent the ocean currents near the coast accurately.


Ocean Science ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 491-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. I. Shapiro ◽  
D. L. Aleynik ◽  
L. D. Mee

Abstract. There is growing understanding that recent deterioration of the Black Sea ecosystem was partly due to changes in the marine physical environment. This study uses high resolution 0.25° climatology to analyze sea surface temperature variability over the 20th century in two contrasting regions of the sea. Results show that the deep Black Sea was cooling during the first three quarters of the century and was warming in the last 15–20 years; on aggregate there was a statistically significant cooling trend. The SST variability over the Western shelf was more volatile and it does not show statistically significant trends. The cooling of the deep Black Sea is at variance with the general trend in the North Atlantic and may be related to the decrease of westerly winds over the Black Sea, and a greater influence of the Siberian anticyclone. The timing of the changeover from cooling to warming coincides with the regime shift in the Black Sea ecosystem.


Ocean Science ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Skandrani ◽  
J.-M. Brankart ◽  
N. Ferry ◽  
J. Verron ◽  
P. Brasseur ◽  
...  

Abstract. In the context of stand alone ocean models, the atmospheric forcing is generally computed using atmospheric parameters that are derived from atmospheric reanalysis data and/or satellite products. With such a forcing, the sea surface temperature that is simulated by the ocean model is usually significantly less accurate than the synoptic maps that can be obtained from the satellite observations. This not only penalizes the realism of the ocean long-term simulations, but also the accuracy of the reanalyses or the usefulness of the short-term operational forecasts (which are key GODAE and MERSEA objectives). In order to improve the situation, partly resulting from inaccuracies in the atmospheric forcing parameters, the purpose of this paper is to investigate a way of further adjusting the state of the atmosphere (within appropriate error bars), so that an explicit ocean model can produce a sea surface temperature that better fits the available observations. This is done by performing idealized assimilation experiments in which Mercator-Ocean reanalysis data are considered as a reference simulation describing the true state of the ocean. Synthetic observation datasets for sea surface temperature and salinity are extracted from the reanalysis to be assimilated in a low resolution global ocean model. The results of these experiments show that it is possible to compute piecewise constant parameter corrections, with predefined amplitude limitations, so that long-term free model simulations become much closer to the reanalysis data, with misfit variance typically divided by a factor 3. These results are obtained by applying a Monte Carlo method to simulate the joint parameter/state prior probability distribution. A truncated Gaussian assumption is used to avoid the most extreme and non-physical parameter corrections. The general lesson of our experiments is indeed that a careful specification of the prior information on the parameters and on their associated uncertainties is a key element in the computation of realistic parameter estimates, especially if the system is affected by other potential sources of model errors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evangelos Moschos ◽  
Alexandre Stegner ◽  
Olivier Schwander ◽  
Patrick Gallinari

<p>Mesoscale eddies are oceanic vortices with radii of tens of kilometers, which live on for several months or even years. They carry large amounts of heat, salt, nutrients, and pollutants from their regions of formation to remote areas, making it important to detect and track them. Using satellite altimetric maps, mesoscale eddies have been detected via remote sensing with advancing performance over the last years <strong>[1]</strong>. However, the spatio-temporal interpolation between satellite track measurements, needed to produce these maps, induces a limit to the spatial resolution (1/12° in the Med Sea) and large amounts of uncertainty in non-measured areas.</p><p>Nevertheless, mesoscale oceanic eddies also have a visible signature on other satellite imagery such as Sea Surface Temperature (SST), portraying diverse patterns of coherent vortices, temperature gradients, and swirling filaments. Learning the regularities of such signatures defines a challenging pattern recognition task, due to their complex structure but also to the cloud coverage which can corrupt a large fraction of the image.</p><p>We introduce a novel Deep Learning approach to classify sea temperature eddy signatures <strong>[2]</strong>. We create a large dataset of SST patches from satellite imagery in the Mediterranean Sea, containing Anticyclonic, Cyclonic, or No Eddy signatures, based on altimetric eddy detections of the DYNED-Atlas <strong>[3]</strong>. Our trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can differentiate between these signatures with an accuracy of more than 90%, robust to a high level of cloud coverage.</p><p>We furtherly evaluate the efficiency of our classifier on SST patches extracted from oceanographic numerical model outputs in the Mediterranean Sea. Our promising results suggest that the CNN could complement the detection, tracking, and prediction of the path of mesoscale oceanic eddies.</p><p><strong>[1]</strong> <em>Chelton, D. B., Schlax, M. G. and Samelson, R. M. (2011). Global observations of nonlinear mesoscale eddies. Progress in oceanography, 91(2),167-216.</em></p><p><strong>[2]</strong> <em>E. Moschos, A. Stegner, O. Schwander and P. Gallinari, "Classification of Eddy Sea Surface Temperature Signatures Under Cloud Coverage," in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 13, pp. 3437-3447, 2020, doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2020.3001830.</em></p><p><strong>[3]</strong> <em>https://www.lmd.polytechnique.fr/dyned/</em></p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (14) ◽  
pp. 6025-6045
Author(s):  
Jing Sun ◽  
Mojib Latif ◽  
Wonsun Park ◽  
Taewook Park

AbstractThe North Atlantic (NA) basin-averaged sea surface temperature (NASST) is often used as an index to study climate variability in the NA sector. However, there is still some debate on what drives it. Based on observations and climate models, an analysis of the different influences on the NASST index and its low-pass filtered version, the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) index, is provided. In particular, the relationships of the two indices with some of its mechanistic drivers including the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) are investigated. In observations, the NASST index accounts for significant SST variability over the tropical and subpolar NA. The NASST index is shown to lump together SST variability originating from different mechanisms operating on different time scales. The AMO index emphasizes the subpolar SST variability. In the climate models, the SST-anomaly pattern associated with the NASST index is similar. The AMO index, however, only represents pronounced SST variability over the extratropical NA, and this variability is significantly linked to the AMOC. There is a sensitivity of this linkage to the cold NA SST bias observed in many climate models. Models suffering from a large cold bias exhibit a relatively weak linkage between the AMOC and AMO and vice versa. Finally, the basin-averaged SST in its unfiltered form, which has been used to question a strong influence of ocean dynamics on NA SST variability, mixes together multiple types of variability occurring on different time scales and therefore underemphasizes the role of ocean dynamics in the multidecadal variability of NA SSTs.


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