Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2017. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 122 (2017): 2519–2538, doi:10.1002/2016JC012331.
Description:
High horizontal-resolution (1=12:5° and 1=25°) 41-layer global simulations of the HYbrid
Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM), forced by both atmospheric fields and the astronomical tidal potential,
are used to construct global maps of sea surface height (SSH) variability. The HYCOM output is separated
into steric and nonsteric and into subtidal, diurnal, semidiurnal, and supertidal frequency bands. The model
SSH output is compared to two data sets that offer some geographical coverage and that also cover a wide
range of frequencies—a set of 351 tide gauges that measure full SSH and a set of 14 in situ vertical profilers
from which steric SSH can be calculated. Three of the global maps are of interest in planning for the
upcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) two-dimensional swath altimeter mission: (1)
maps of the total and (2) nonstationary internal tidal signal (the latter calculated after removing the
stationary internal tidal signal via harmonic analysis), with an average variance of 1:05 and 0:43 cm2,
respectively, for the semidiurnal band, and (3) a map of the steric supertidal contributions, which are
dominated by the internal gravity wave continuum, with an average variance of 0:15 cm2. Stationary
internal tides (which are predictable), nonstationary internal tides (which will be harder to predict), and
nontidal internal gravity waves (which will be very difficult to predict) may all be important sources of
high-frequency ‘‘noise’’ that could mask lower frequency phenomena in SSH measurements made by the
SWOT mission.
Description:
Office of Naval Research Grant Numbers: N00014-11-1-0487 , N00014-15-1-2288;
NASA Earth and Space Science Grant Number: NNX16AO23H;
University of Michigan;
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Grant Numbers: NNX13AD95Q , NNX16AH79G;
National Science Foundation Grant Number: OCE-1351837;
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Grant Numbers: NNX13AE32G , NNX16AH76G , NNX13AE46G
Description:
2017-09-28
Keywords:
Internal gravity waves
;
Internal tides
;
Spectral density
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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