Wind work in a model of the northwest Atlantic Ocean

Zhai, Xiaoming and Greatbatch, Richard J. (2007) Wind work in a model of the northwest Atlantic Ocean. Geophysical Research Letters, 34 (4). ISSN 0094-8276

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Abstract

The work done by the wind over the northwest Atlantic Ocean is examined using a realistic high-resolution ocean model driven by synoptic wind forcing. Two model runs are conducted with the difference only in the way the wind stress is calculated. Our results show that the effect of including ocean surface currents in the wind stress formulation is to reduce the total wind work integrated over the model domain by about 17%. The reduction is caused by a sink term in the wind work calculation associated with the presence of ocean currents. In addition, the modelled eddy kinetic energy decreases by about 10%, in response to direct mechanical damping by the surface stress. A simple scaling argument shows that the latter can be expected to be more important than bottom friction in the energy budget.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	wind work,ocean velocity dependence,mechanical damping
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (former - to 2017) Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Meteorology, Oceanography and Climate Dynamics (former - to 2017) Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Climate, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (former - to 2017) Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	24 Oct 2013 21:23
Last Modified:	24 Oct 2022 04:50
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/43793
DOI:	10.1029/2006GL028907

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