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Enhancement of wind stress evaluation method under storm conditions

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Abstract

Wind stress is an important driving force for many meteorological and oceanographical processes. However, most of the existing methods for evaluation of the wind stress, including various bulk formulas in terms of the wind speed at a given height and formulas relating the roughness height of the sea surface with wind conditions, predict an ever-increasing tendency of the wind stress coefficient as the wind speed increases, which is inconsistent with the field observations under storm conditions. The wave boundary layer model, which is based on the momentum and energy conservation, has the advantage to take into account the physical details of the air–sea interaction process, but is still invalid under storm conditions without a modification. By including the energy dissipation due to the presence of sea spray, which is speculated to be an important aspect of the air–sea interaction under storm conditions, the wave boundary layer model is improved in this study. The improved model is employed to estimate the wind stress caused by an idealized tropical cyclone motion. The computational results show that the wind stress coefficient reaches its maximal value at a wind speed of about 40 m/s and decreases as the wind speed further increases. This is in fairly good agreement with the field data.

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Acknowledgments

This study is financially supported by State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, China, under grant No. 2014-KY-02 and by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grant No. 11472156. The authors would also like to thank Professor Changsheng Chen and the Marine Ecosystem Dynamics Modeling Laboratory at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth for making the FVCOM code publically available.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Yingjian Chen & Xiping Yu

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  1. Yingjian Chen
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  2. Xiping Yu
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Correspondence to Xiping Yu.

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Chen, Y., Yu, X. Enhancement of wind stress evaluation method under storm conditions. Clim Dyn 47, 3833–3843 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3044-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3044-4

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