New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research abstracts

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Features of marine wind fields over New Zealand waters from ERS-1 scatterometer data.

ANDREW K. LAING

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric
Research
P.O. Box 14-901, Kilbirnie
Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract  Wind data from the ERS-1 scatterometer have been processed for New Zealand waters. These show spatial features of marine wind fields which have previously been difficult to resolve using conventional surface-based measurements. Winds across the western access to Cook Strait, delineated by a corridor between Farewell Spit and western Taranaki, were analysed and profiles of wind stress extracted. These show characteristic structures for south-easterly events in which the stress steadily increases from Farewell Spit towards the Taranaki Coast. In westerly or north-westerly events the structure is more uniform. The mean stress across this corridor has been compared to that calculated from surface-based measurements at Farewell Spit and the Maui-A oil and gas production platform off Cape Egmont. The Farewell spit data lead to underestimates of the stress, which partially reconciles previous attempts to model wind-driven currents off the west coast of the South Island from these data. In these the currents were underestimated. The Maui-A data are unbiased in westerly events but give overestimates in south-easterly winds. An improved estimate of the mean stress can be derived from using a combination of wind data from these two stations.

Keywords  marine wind; scatterometer; surface stress; Cook Strait; ERS-1

New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 1994: Vol. 28: 365-378

0028-8330/94/2804-0365 $2.50/0 (c) The Royal Society of New Zealand 1994

PDF file of entire paper: medium quality (3213K); (scanned from paper original: notes about this process)

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