Publication Date:
2013-01-04
Description:
[1] Several tens of thousands of temperature profiles are used to investigate the thermal evolution of the cold wake of Typhoon Fanapi, 2010. Typhoon Fanapi formed a cold wake in the Western North Pacific Ocean on 18 September characterized by a mixed layer that was 〉2.5 °C cooler than surrounding water, and extending to 〉80 m, twice as deep as the pre-existing mixed layer. The initial cold wake became capped after 4 days as a warm, thin surface layer formed. The thickness of the capped wake, defined as the 26 °C to 27 °C layer, decreased, approaching the background thickness of this layer with an e-folding time of 23 days, almost twice the e-folding lifetime of the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) cold wake (12 days). The wake was advected several hundreds of kilometers from the storm track by a pre-existing mesoscale eddy. The observations reveal new intricacies of cold wake evolution and demonstrate the challenges of describing the thermal structure of the upper ocean using sea surface information alone. © 2013 American Geophysical Union. All rights reserved.
Print ISSN:
0094-8276
Electronic ISSN:
1944-8007
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
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