Y. Hsueh et Dl. Yuan, A NUMERICAL STUDY OF CURRENTS, HEAT ADVECTION, AND SEA-LEVEL FLUCTUATIONS IN THE YELLOW SEA IN WINTER 1986, Journal of physical oceanography, 27(11), 1997, pp. 2313-2326
A vertically integrated model that incorporates horizontal temperature
variations is used to study the circulation of the Yellow Sea in a wi
ntertime period for which velocity and temperature measurements are av
ailable at several moorings locations along a central trough. The mode
l features realistic bottom topography and is forced with wind stress
and heat flux fields from 13 January to 22 February 1986. The model al
so incorporates, as a boundary condition, sea-level fluctuations deriv
ed from coastal and insular ride gauge stations along model boundaries
in open waters. The model reproduces well sea level fluctuations alon
g the coasts of both China and Korea. The hindcast velocity time serie
s, particularly for the north-south component, track those obtained fr
om direct measurements at the moorings. The model momentum balance ind
icates that the northward flow in the trough is driven by a sea level
setup to the south in response to northerly wind bursts in the winter
monsoon. The sea-level fluctuations propagate around the Yellow Sea em
bayment in a counterclockwise sense and exhibit a northward increase i
n amplitude along both the China and Korea coasts, apparently due to t
he general shallowness of the northern reaches of the embayment. The l
ack of a suitable initial condition in temperature and the presence of
large biases in the sea surface heat flux distribution preclude the h
indcast of the temperature field. Yet trajectories of model fluid disp
lacement confirm an overall northward transport of mass, and hence hea
t and salt, even though the northerly wind-pulse-dominated current flu
ctuates with a small mean. While wintertime currents in the Yellow Sea
appear dominated by the wind forcing, empirical orthogonal function a
nalysis of model sea-level fluctuations attributes 48% of the variance
to a mode whose time variation follows those of sea-level heights imp
osed along the open model boundaries. The mode with a time variation s
imilar to that found in the wind stress magnitude time series accounts
for only 28% of the variance. This suggests the domination of sea-lev
el fluctuations by low-frequency fluctuations in the Kuroshio.