Satellite derived scatterometer / ERS-1 sea surface wind vorticity in the Southwestern Indian Ocean

Abstract

During January-July 1993 an experiment was conducted in the Southwestern Indian Ocean with the aim to analyze the relationship between oceanographic events and weekly satellite derived Sea Surface Wind Vorticity (SSWV) fields computed following the Rossby equation from the scatterometer ERS-1 data sets, and compared with satellite derived Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from AVHRR/ NOAA imagery. SST and SSWV imagery showed that variation in the ocean pattern occurs in apparent response to submesoscale oceanographic events such as fronts or eddies that varied on time scales of one week.