Principal-component estimates of the Kuroshio Current axis and path based on the mathematical verification between satellite altimeter and drifting buoy data

We used satellite altimetry data to investigate the Kuroshio Current because of the higher resolution and wider range of observations. In previous studies, satellite absolute geostrophic velocities were used to study the spatiotemporal variability of the sea surface velocity field along the current, and extraction methods were employed to detect the Kuroshio axes and paths. However, sea surface absolute geostrophic velocity estimated from absolute dynamic topography should be regarded as the geostrophic component of the actual surface velocity, which cannot represent a sea surface current accurately. In this study, mathematical verification between the climatic absolute geostrophic and bin-averaged drifting buoy velocity was established and then adopted to correct the satellite absolute geostrophic velocities. There were some differences in the characteristics between satellite geostrophic and drifting buoy velocities. As a result, the corrected satellite absolute geostrophic velocities were used to detect the Kuroshio axis and path based on a principal-component detection scheme. The results showed that the detection of the Kuroshio axes and paths from corrected absolute geostrophic velocities performed better than those from satellite absolute geostrophic velocities and surface current estimations. The corrected satellite absolute geostrophic velocity may therefore contribute to more precise day-to-day detection of the Kuroshio Current axis and path.

Geostrophic current estimation using altimeter data at ground track crossovers in the northwest Pacific Ocean

Geostrophic current comprises a large portion of the ocean current, which plays an important role in global climate change. Based on classic oceanography, geostrophic current can be derived from pressure gradient. Assuming water density to be constant, we can estimate geostrophic current from Absolute Dynamic Topography （ADT）. In this paper, we use ADT data obtained from multi-satellite altimeters to extract sea surface tilts along- track at crossover points. The calculated tilts along these two tracks can be converted into orthogonal directions and are used to estimate geostrophic current. In northwest Pacific, computed geostrophic current velocities are evaluated with Argos data. In total, 771 pairs of temporally and spatially consistent Argos measurements along with estimated geostrophic velocity datasets are used for validation. In this study, the effect of different cut-off wavelengths of the low pass filter applied to ADT is discussed. Our results show that a cut-offwavelength of 75 km is the most suitable choice for the study area. The estimated geostrophic velocity and the Argos measurement are in good agreement with each other, with a correlation coefficient of 0.867 for zonal component, and 0.734 for meridional one. Furthermore, an empirical relationship between the estimated geostrophic velocity and Argos measurement is derived, providing us a favorable and convenient approach to estimate sea surface flow velocity from the geostrophic velocity derived from altimeter data. The experimental application of the derived method on Kuroshio reveals reasonable results compared with previous studies.