Abstract
By incorporating the wave-induced Coriolis-Stokes forcing into the classical Ekman layer, the wave-modified ocean surface currents in the northwestern Pacific Ocean were estimated. Thus, the ocean surface currents are the combination of classical Ekman current from the cross-calibrated multi-platform (CCMP) wind speed, geostrophic current from the mean absolute dynamic topography (MADT), and wave-induced current based on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Interim Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim) surface wave datasets. Weight functions are introduced in the Ekman current formulation as well. Comparisons with in-situ data from Lagrangian drifters in the study area and Kuroshio Extension Observatory (KEO) observations at 32.3°N, 144.6°E, and 15-m depth indicate that wave-modified ocean surface currents provide accurate time means of zonal and meridional currents in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. Result shows that the wave-modified currents are quite consistent with the Lagrangian drifter observations for the period 1993–2017 in the deep ocean. The correlation (root mean square error, RMSE) is 0.96 (1.45 cm/s) for the zonal component and 0.90 (1.07 cm/s) for the meridional component. However, wave-modified currents underestimate the Lagrangian drifter velocity in strong current and some offshore regions, especially in the regions along the Japan coast and the southeastern Mindanao. What’s more, the wave-modified currents overestimate the pure Eulerian KEO current which does not consider the impact of waves, and the zonal (meridional) correlation and RMSE are 0.95 (0.90) and 11.25 cm/s (12.05 cm/s) respectively. These comparisons demonstrate that our wave-modified ocean surface currents have high precision and can describe the real-world ocean in the northwestern Pacific Ocean accurately and intuitively, which can provide important routes to calculate ocean surface currents on large spatial scales.
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Data Availability Statement
The MADT data is provided by CMEMS (http://marine.copernicus.eu/services-portfolio/access-toproducts/?option=com_csw&view=details&product_id=SEALEVEL_GLO_PHY_L4_REP_OBSERVATIONS_008_047) and is downloaded from ftp://my.cmemsdu.eu/Core/SEALEVEL_GLO_PHY_L4_REP_OBSERVATIONS_008_047/dataset-duacs-rep-globalmerged-allsat-phy-l4. The CCMP Version-2.0 vector wind is produced by the Remote Sensing Systems. Data are available at: http://data.remss.com/ccmp/v02.0/. The ERA-Interim surface wave data is downloaded from http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-daily. The in-situ Lagrangian drifter currents are downloaded from https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/gdp/. The in-situ KEO observations are available at https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/ocs/data/disdel/.
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Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42106034), the Laboratory for Regional Oceanography and Numerical Modeling, Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Qingdao) (No. 2019A02), the Basic Scientific Fund for National Public Research Institutes of China (No. 2020Q05), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41706034, 41706225, 41906003)
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Hui, Z., Li, Y., Sun, J. et al. Validation and error analysis of wave-modified ocean surface currents in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. J. Ocean. Limnol. 40, 1289–1303 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-021-1182-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-021-1182-y