Note on the vertical velocity and diffusive salt flux induced by evaporation and precipitation
Citable URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1912/3996As published
https://doi.org/10.1175/2009JPO4069.1DOI
10.1175/2009JPO4069.1Keyword
Evaporation; Precipitation; Salinity; FluxesAbstract
Some (not all) of the oceanographic literature slightly miscalculates the vertical velocity (w) and diffusive salt flux induced by evaporation (E) and precipitation (P) at the sea surface. Short, simple, physical derivations are presented to show that, for a sea surface h = h(x, y, t) varying in space and time, 1) w = VH · h + ∂h/∂t + ρF(E − P)/ρ, where VH is the horizontal component of the aggregate parcel velocity, and ρF and ρ are the densities of freshwater and surface seawater, respectively; and 2) the vertical diffusive salt flux at the sea surface (whether molecular or turbulent) is −ρFS(E − P), where S is the surface salinity.
Description
Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2009. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 39 (2009): 2680-2682, doi:10.1175/2009JPO4069.1.
Collections
Suggested Citation
Journal of Physical Oceanography 39 (2009): 2680-2682Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Oceanic and terrestrial sources of continental precipitation
Gimeno, Luis; Stohl, Andreas; Trigo, Ricardo M.; Dominguez, Francina; Yoshimura, Kei; Yu, Lisan; Drumond, Anita; Duran-Quesada, Ana Maria; Nieto, Raquel (American Geophysical Union, 2012-11-08)The most important sources of atmospheric moisture at the global scale are herein identified, both oceanic and terrestrial, and a characterization is made of how continental regions are influenced by water from different ... -
Westward mountain-gap wind jets of the northern Red Sea as seen by QuikSCAT
Menezes, Viviane V.; Farrar, J. Thomas; Bower, Amy S. (Elsevier, 2018-03-19)We analyse ten years of QuikSCAT satellite surface winds to statistically characterize the spatio-temporal variability of the westward mountain-gap wind jets over the northern Red Sea. These wind jets bring relatively cold ... -
On sea surface salinity skin effect iInduced by evaporation and implications for remote sensing of ocean salinity
Yu, Lisan (American Meteorological Society, 2010-01)The existence of a cool and salty sea surface skin under evaporation was first proposed by Saunders in 1967, but few efforts have since been made to perceive the salt component of the skin layer. With two salinity missions ...