Impact of diurnally-varying skin temperature on surface fluxes over the tropical Pacific

Xubin Zeng, Robert E. Dickinson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multi-year hourly data of air temperature, wind speed, and humidity from the TOGA TAO moored buoys over the tropical Pacific along with our derived hourly sea surface skin temperature data are analyzed to show that there are substantial diurnal variations of monthly averaged surface fluxes of latent heat, sensible heat, and momentum (eg, one-third of the cases show monthly averaged latent heat diurnal amplitudes greater than 20 Wm-2). Daily or monthly average surface temperatures cannot provide such flux variations, suggesting that numerical modeling may require the inclusion of the diurnal variation of surface skin temperature.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1411-1414
Number of pages4
JournalGeophysical Research Letters
Volume25
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - May 1 1998

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Geophysics
  • General Earth and Planetary Sciences

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Impact of diurnally-varying skin temperature on surface fluxes over the tropical Pacific'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this