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    The Equatorial Undercurrent and TAO sampling bias from a decade at SEA

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    jtech-d-13-00262%2E1.pdf (1.487Mb)
    Date
    2014-09
    Author
    Leslie, William R.  Concept link
    Karnauskas, Kristopher B.  Concept link
    Metadata
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    Citable URI
    https://hdl.handle.net/1912/6835
    As published
    https://doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-13-00262.1
    Related Material/Data
    https://hdl.handle.net/1912/6746
    https://hdl.handle.net/1912/7105
    DOI
    10.1175/JTECH-D-13-00262.1
    Keyword
     Pacific Ocean; Tropics; Currents; Ocean dynamics; Buoy observations; Sampling 
    Abstract
    The NOAA Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) moored array has, for three decades, been a valuable resource for monitoring and forecasting El Niño–Southern Oscillation and understanding physical oceanographic as well as coupled processes in the tropical Pacific influencing global climate. Acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) measurements by TAO moorings provide benchmarks for evaluating numerical simulations of subsurface circulation including the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC). Meanwhile, the Sea Education Association (SEA) has been collecting data during repeat cruises to the central equatorial Pacific Ocean (160°–126°W) throughout the past decade that provide useful cross validation and quantitative insight into the potential for stationary observing platforms such as TAO to incur sampling biases related to the strength of the EUC. This paper describes some essential sampling characteristics of the SEA dataset, compares SEA and TAO velocity measurements in the vicinity of the EUC, shares new insight into EUC characteristics and behavior only observable in repeat cross-equatorial sections, and estimates the sampling bias incurred by equatorial TAO moorings in their estimates of the velocity and transport of the EUC. The SEA high-resolution ADCP dataset compares well with concurrent TAO measurements (RMSE = 0.05 m s−1; R2 = 0.98), suggests that the EUC core meanders sinusoidally about the equator between ±0.4° latitude, and reveals a mean sampling bias of equatorial measurements (e.g., TAO) of the EUC’s zonal velocity of −0.14 ± 0.03 m s−1 as well as a ~10% underestimation of EUC volume transport. A bias-corrected monthly record and climatology of EUC strength at 140°W for 1990–2010 is presented.
    Description
    Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2014. 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 Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 21 (2014): 2015–2025, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-13-00262.1.
    Collections
    • Geology and Geophysics (G&G)
    • Faculty Publications
    Suggested Citation
    Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 21 (2014): 2015–2025
     

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