| Summary: | Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 120 (2015): 3199–3208, doi:10.1002/2014JD022584. We present the first continuous in situ atmospheric observations from the central Iceland Sea collected from a meteorological buoy deployed for a 2 year period between 23 November 2007 and 21 August 2009. We use these observations to evaluate the ERA-Interim reanalysis product and demonstrate that it represented low-level meteorological fields and surface turbulent fluxes in this region very well. The buoy observations showed that moderate to strong winds were common from any direction, while wind speeds below 5 ms−1 were relatively rare. The observed low-level air temperature and surface heat fluxes were related to the wind direction with cold-air outbreaks most common from the northwest. Mean wintertime turbulent heat fluxes were modest (<60 Wm−2), but the range was substantial. High heat flux events, greater than 200 Wm−2, typically occurred every 1–2 weeks in the winter, with each event lasting on average 2.5 days with an average total turbulent heat flux of ∼200 Wm−2 out of the ocean. The most pronounced high heat flux events over the central Iceland Sea were associated with cold-air outbreaks from the north and west forced by a deep Lofoten Low over the Norwegian Sea. This work was funded in part by the Ocean and Climate Change Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and NSF grant OCE-1433958. 2015-10-24
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