| Summary: | Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 43 (2016): 12,199–12,207, doi:10.1002/2016GL071178. Upper ocean responses to tropical storms/hurricanes have been extensively studied using satellite observations. However, resolving concurrent sea surface temperature (SST) and chlorophyll α (chl α) responses along storm tracks remains a major challenge due to extensive cloud coverage in satellite images. Here we produce daily cloud-free SST and chl α reconstructions based on the Data INterpolating Empirical Orthogonal Function method over a 10 year period (2003–2012) for the Gulf of Mexico and Sargasso Sea regions. Daily reconstructions allow us to characterize and contrast previously obscured subweekly SST and chl α responses to storms in the two main storm-impacted regions of the Atlantic Ocean. Statistical analyses of daily SST and chl α responses revealed regional differences in the response time as well as the response sensitivity to maximum sustained wind speed and translation speed. This study demonstrates that SST and chl α responses clearly depend on regional ocean conditions and are not as universal as might have been previously suggested. Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative/GISR Grant Number: 02-S130202; NOAA Grant Number: NA11NOS0120033; NASA Grant Numbers: NNX12AP84G, NNX13AD80G 2017-06-14
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