Sea surface height variations in the South China Sea from satellite altimetry |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University, P.O. Box 8208, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA;2. Horn Point Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, P.O. Box 0775, Cambridge, MA 21613, USA;3. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA;1. Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA;2. NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry, College Park, MD 20740, USA;1. School of Marine Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China;2. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Marine Resources and Coastal Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China;3. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China;4. State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Science, Guangzhou, 510301, China;1. Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road Section 2, Nankang, 115 Taipei, Taiwan;2. Institute of Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia;3. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, CA 90089, Los Angeles, United States;4. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong;5. Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23508United States;1. Ocean College, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China;2. State Key Laboratory of Satellite Ocean Environment Dynamics, SIO/SOA, Hangzhou, China;3. School of Marine Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, China;4. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA;5. National Satellite Ocean Application Service, SOA, Beijing, China;6. State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea, Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China |
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| Abstract: | Sea surface elevation in the South China Sea is examined in the Topex/Poseidon altimeter data from 1992 to 1995. Sea level anomalies are smoothed along satellite tracks and in time with tidal errors reduced by harmonic analysis. The smoothed data are sampled every ten days with an along-track separation of about 40 km. The data reveal significant annual variations in sea level. In winter, low sea level is over the entire deep basin with two local lows centred off Luzon and the Sunda Shelf. In summer, sea level is high off Luzon and off the Sunda Shelf, and a low off Vietnam separates the two highs. The boundary between the Vietnam low and Sunda high coincides with the location of a jet leaving the coast of Vietnam described in earlier studies. Principal component analysis shows that the sea level variation consists mainly of two modes, corresponding well to the first two modes of the wind stress curl. Mode 1 represents the oscillation in the southern basin and shows little inter-annual variation. The mode 2 oscillation is weak in the southern basin and is strongest off central Vietnam. During the winters of 1992–1993 and 1994–1995 and the following summers, the wind stress curl is weak, and the mode 2 sea level variation in the northern basin is reduced, resulting in weaker winter and summer gyres. Weakening of the Vietnam low in summer implies diminishing of the eastward jet leaving the coast of Vietnam. The results are consistent with model simulations. |
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