Torres, H.; Wineteer, A.; Klein, P.; Lee, T.; Wang, J.; Rodriguez, E.; Menemenlis, D.; Zhang, H. Anticipated Capabilities of the ODYSEA Wind and Current Mission Concept to Estimate Wind Work at the Air–Sea Interface. Remote Sens.2023, 15, 3337.
Torres, H.; Wineteer, A.; Klein, P.; Lee, T.; Wang, J.; Rodriguez, E.; Menemenlis, D.; Zhang, H. Anticipated Capabilities of the ODYSEA Wind and Current Mission Concept to Estimate Wind Work at the Air–Sea Interface. Remote Sens. 2023, 15, 3337.
Torres, H.; Wineteer, A.; Klein, P.; Lee, T.; Wang, J.; Rodriguez, E.; Menemenlis, D.; Zhang, H. Anticipated Capabilities of the ODYSEA Wind and Current Mission Concept to Estimate Wind Work at the Air–Sea Interface. Remote Sens.2023, 15, 3337.
Torres, H.; Wineteer, A.; Klein, P.; Lee, T.; Wang, J.; Rodriguez, E.; Menemenlis, D.; Zhang, H. Anticipated Capabilities of the ODYSEA Wind and Current Mission Concept to Estimate Wind Work at the Air–Sea Interface. Remote Sens. 2023, 15, 3337.
Abstract
The kinetic energy transfer between the atmosphere and oceans, called wind work, affects ocean dynamics including near-inertial oscillations and internal gravity waves, mesoscale eddies, and large-scale zonal jets. For the most part, recent numerical estimates of global wind work amplitude are almost 5 times larger than those reported 10 years ago. This large increase is explained by the impact of the broad range of spatial and temporal scales covered by winds and currents, the smallest of which have only recently been uncovered by increasingly high resolution modeling efforts. However, existing satellite observations do not fully sample this broad range of scales. The present study assesses the capabilities of ODYSEA, a conceptual satellite mission to estimate the amplitude of wind work in the global ocean. To this end, we use an ODYSEA measurement simulator fed by the outputs of a km-scale coupled ocean-atmosphere model to estimate wind work globally. Results indicate that compared with numerical truth estimates, the ODYSEA instrument performs well globally, except for latitudes north of 40∘N during summer due to unresolved storm evolution. This performance is explained by the wide-swath properties of ODYSEA (a 1,700 km wide swath with 5 km posting for winds and surface currents), its twice-a-day (daily) coverage at mid-latitudes (low latitudes), and the insensitivity of the wind work to uncorrelated errors in estimated wind and current.
Keywords
Wind and current mission concept; Doppler scatterometer; wind work
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Oceanography
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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