HR: 0830h
AN: A41C-06    [Abstracts]
TI: Comparison and Validation of Latent Heat Fluxes From NWP Model Analyses Over the Tropical Pacific
AU: * Jin, x
EM: xjin@whoi.edu
AF: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 360 Woods Hole Rd., Woods Hole, MA 02543
AU: Yu, l
EM: lyu@whoi.edu
AF: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 360 Woods Hole Rd., Woods Hole, MA 02543
AU: Weller, R A
EM: rweller@whoi.edu
AF: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 360 Woods Hole Rd., Woods Hole, MA 02543
AB: Latent heat fluxes estimated by the NCEP/NCAR and NCEP/DOE reanalyses, ECMWF reanalyses and operational analyses are assessed by comparison with the fluxes derived from buoys measurements in the tropical Pacific covering the period 1991-2002. The buoys latent heat fluxes are obtained using the bulk flux algorithm COARE3.0 (Fairall et al., 2003). The mean differences between the buoys fluxes and the fluxes estimated from NCEP/NCAR, NCEP/DOE, ECMWF reanalyses and operational analyses are about 4, 22, 11 and 30W/m2, espectively, indicating the NCEP and ECMWF models tend to overestimate latent heat loss to the tropical ocean. Furthermore, NCEP/DOE and ECMWF reanalyses reveal a significant upward trend of the regional mean latent heat fluxes during 1991-2002, whereas the other two analyses as well as the buoys fluxes indicate a weak upward trend. Temporal correlation analysis shows ECMWF reanalyses is the best in comparison with the buoys fluxes. Using the NWP analyses surface layer meteorological fields and COARE3.0 algorithm, the latent heat fluxes were recalculated and the revised latent heat fluxes are found to be significantly reduced in comparison with the original ones. However, temporal correlations between the revised and the original fluxes are extremely high for all the cases except for ECMWF reanalyses, of which the revised fluxes before 1996 are much higher than the average while the original fluxes are lower than the average. In comparison with the buoys fluxes, the mean revised NCEP/NCAR fluxes is found to be underestimated due to a weak wind. On the other hand, the mean revised ECMWF operational fluxes is still overestimated due to a dry bias. The mean revised NCEP/DOE latent heat fluxes is closed to the buoys average. And the revised ECMWF reanalyses fluxes agree very well with the buoys fluxes after 1996.
DE: 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325)
DE: 1620 Climate dynamics (3309)
DE: 3319 General circulation
DE: 3337 Numerical modeling and data assimilation
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly