Topographical effect of the Antarctic Peninsula on a strong wind event

The topographical effect on a strong wind event that occurred on 7 January 2013 at King Sejong Station (KSJ), Antarctica, was investigated using the Polar Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Numerical experiments applying three different terrain heights of the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) were performed to quantitatively estimate the topographical effect on the selected strong wind event. The experiment employing original AP topography successfully represented the observed features in the strong wind event, both in terms of peak wind speed (by ~94%; ~19.7 m/s) and abrupt transitions of wind speed. In contrast, the experiment with a flattened terrain height significantly underestimated the peak wind speeds (by ~51%; ~10.4 m/s) of the observations. An absence of AP topography failed to simulate both a strong discontinuity of sea-level pressure fields around the east coast of the AP and a strong south-easterly wind over the AP. As a result, the observed downslope windstorm, driven by a flow overriding a barrier, was not formed at the western side of the AP, resulting in no further enhancement of the wind at KSJ. This result demonstrates that the topography of the AP played a critical role in driving the strong wind event at KSJ on 7 January 2013, accounting for ~50% of the total wind speed.

ON THE EFFECT OF CONFIGURATIONS OF THE COAST ON THE STORM SURGES IN THE ISE BAY

Wind drift is generally considered as the predominant factor of the storm surge along the sea coast. Authors noticed the fact that the duration of the wind blow of any direction is not long even at a big typhoon, while the storm surges more than 2 m are sometimes observed in the interiors of Osaka-, Ise-, and Tokyo-bay, and they have studied on another factor which might cause such water rise. A hump of water caused by a low atomospheric pressure transmits in the manner of a long wave and is deformed under the topographical effect when it comes into a bay. Authors are intending to show that the build-up of water due to topographical effect is sometimes larger than that occurring by wind drift. In this paper, the calculation was carried on neglecting the effect of wind drift and its result was compared with the observed value.

Modeling topographical density for geoid determinationThis article is one of a series of papers published in this Special Issue on the theme GEODESY.

In geoid computation, effects of real three-dimensional topographic masses on the Earth’s gravity field must be accurately quantified and, in the Stokes–Helmert scheme, replaced with effects of those masses condensed on the geoid. The most comprehensive modern schemes for evaluation of topographical effects account for terrain effects, use a spherical model of topography, and incorporate two-dimensionally varying models of topographical mass density. In this contribution, we employ a three-dimensionally varying model of topographical density. We use Newton’s integration to determine the direct topographical effect (DTE) on gravity and primary indirect topographical effect (PITE) on gravity potential. Lastly, we apply Stokes’ integration to calculate the DTE, PITE, and secondary indirect topographical effect (SITE) on geoidal height. We focus here on validation of our results and demonstration of our software’s capabilities. We present results for the simple geometrical shape of a disc under various rotations and for the anomalous density of lake waters. Effects on geoidal height for these simulations reach centimetre level, up to 2.2 cm in magnitude. For a simulation of the effects of neglected mass anomalies of the lakes, we find results reaching 0.8 cm in magnitude. We examine the behavior of our results as calculated using various step sizes for numerical integration and by comparing numerical results with analytical results for the specific case of a disc. These results suggest that the maximum percent error of our results is about 23.5% for the DTE on gravity and 7.6% for the PITE on gravity potential.