FY 1999

Oceanic response to buoyancy flux and wind stress during COARE

Weller, R.A., S.P. Anderson, H.W. Wijesekera, C.A. Paulson, M.F. Cronin, and L.M. Rothstein

In COARE98—Proceedings of a Conference on the TOGA Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment, WCRP-107, WMO/TD-No. 940, Boulder, CO, 7–14 July 1998, 43–58 (1999)

One of the four major goals of TOGA COARE was "to describe and understand the oceanic response to combined buoyancy and wind-stress forcing in the western Pacific warm pool." Many components of the field program and many of the subsequent analysis and modeling efforts addressed this goal. In this paper a review of these studies is provided, with the aim of determining how successfully COARE addressed this goal, the impacts of this work, and the questions that remain.