INFERENCE OF SUBSURFACE THERMOHALINE STRUCTURE FROM FIELDS MEASURABLEBY SATELLITE

Satellites now provide global measurements of the ocean's surface heig ht and temperature. Ocean climatologies for the northwest Pacific and northwest Atlantic Oceans that relate sea surface height, sea surface temperature, day of the year, latitude, and longitude to temperature a nd salinity profiles were produced using least-squares regression. The se analyses use over 33 000 profiles of historical temperature and sal inity data and are considerably streamlined and compacted by expressin g each profile in terms of empirical orthogonal functions. Evaluations and error analyses of the climatologies, including a comparison to th e navy's Generalized Digital Environmental Model, were performed and d ifferences between the regions are discussed. Two sample vertical sect ions are shown to be closely reproduced with the climatologies. Climat ologies based on surface height and temperature are found to offer con siderable improvement over climatologies based only on position.