HR: 17:05h
AN: OS42B-04    [Abstracts]
TI: Correlations Between Sea-Surface Salinity Tendencies and Freshwater Fluxes in the Pacific Ocean
AU: * Li, Z
EM: zhen.li@gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: Science Applications International Corporation(SAIC), 4600 Powder Mill Road, Suite 40, Beltsville, MD 20705, United States
AU: Adamec, D
EM: David.Adamec@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Oceans Sciences Branch, Code 614.2, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AB: Temporal changes in sea-surface salinity (SSS) from 21 years of a high resolution model integration of the Pacific Ocean are correlated with the freshwater flux used to force the integration. The correlations are calculated on a 1°x1° grid, and on a monthly scale to assess the possibility of deducing evaporation minus precipitation (E-P) fields from the salinity measurements to be taken by NASA's Aquarius mission. Correlations between the mean seasonal E-P fields and mean seasonal SSS temporal tendencies tend to be zonally- oriented, and are highest where the local precipitation is also relatively high. This result is consistent with Delcroix et al.'s (1996) previous work for large spatial scales in the tropical Pacific. However, the model's fine resolution also shows the result to be true on finer scales and areas not considered by that study. Nonseasonal correlations are highest in the mid-latitudes with relatively smaller correlations in the tropics.
DE: 4504 Air/sea interactions (0312, 3339)
DE: 4532 General circulation (1218, 1222)
DE: 4572 Upper ocean and mixed layer processes
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly