Research Symposium

BIO

I am Lauryn Fox, a Junior Meteorology Student from Saint Petersburg, Florida. I've really enjoyed the research processes that I've had the opportunity to take part in so far in my student career, and I hope to pursue research in applications of meteorology in renewable energy some day.

Application of the Cloud-based Data Match-up Service to examine the dependence of surface wind speed and wind curl on the intensity of marine heat waves.

Abstract

We used spatially and temporally matched SST and wind data to examine the SST anomalies in a North Pacific marine heat wave. We examine if the value of SST is dependent on the wind speed and curl. The Cloud-based Data Match-up Service (CDMS) has been developed to match observations spatially and temporally from two satellite data sets. We demonstrate this using the ASCAT-B-L2-Coastal scatterometer wind and MUR-25km-JPL-L4-Global SST datasets. It has been previously demonstrated that low wind speeds are associated with large diurnal changes in SST and in variations in surface heat fluxes in the Indian Ocean. We first examine if the probability distribution function (PDF) of SST during a North Pacific marine heat wave changes as a function of wind speed. We find that the PDF of SST is independent of wind speed and concluded that (for the case examined) that variations in wind speed cannot explain the variations in SST. Alternatively, the curl of surface wind is an indicator of larger scale weather patterns (higher or lower pressure systems) and of the direction of advection due to these patterns. Similarly, we examine the dependence of the SST pdf on the curl of surface wind. We will present details and examples of the match up service, and the two studies related to marine heat waves.

Keywords: Meteorology, Vorticity, Marine Heating, Satellite Data