Oceanic Influence on Global Hydrologic Cycle Observed from Space

The divergence of moisture transport integrated over the depth of the atmosphere over global oceans show similar geographic distribution as the surface fresh water flux (evaporationprecipitation). The temporal variations of the two terms also agree, from intraseasonal to interannual time scales, at...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: W. Timothy Liu, Xiaosu Xie, Wenqing Tang
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.379.9234
http://airsea-www.jpl.nasa.gov/publication/paper/Liu-etal-2005-igarss.pdf
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Summary:The divergence of moisture transport integrated over the depth of the atmosphere over global oceans show similar geographic distribution as the surface fresh water flux (evaporationprecipitation). The temporal variations of the two terms also agree, from intraseasonal to interannual time scales, at selected locations. These two forcing terms were found to lead ocean surface salinity changes by 90 ° as expected. The interannual anomalies of the hydrologic parameters in the high latitude regions of North American and Eurasia are found the be opposite in phase, and their differences are found to have significant correlation with the moisture transport in the North Atlantic, suggesting N. Atlantic moisture transport is a bridge to the opposing hydrologic phases of the two continents. 1