Dl. Yuan et Y. Hsueh, INVERSE DETERMINATION OF SURFACE HEAT-FLUX OVER THE YELLOW SEA IN WINTER 1986 FROM SEA-SURFACE TEMPERATURE DATA, Journal of physical oceanography, 28(5), 1998, pp. 984-990
An assimilation of routine sea surface temperature observations is con
ducted to estimate the sea surface heat flux in the Yellow Sea during
the winter of 1986. Ten-day mean SST compilations, published by the Ja
pan Meteorological Agency, are used. The time window is from 0000 Japa
n Local Time (JLT) 21 January to 0000 JLT 21 February 1986. Because th
ere are only three frames of the observed temperature available for th
e time window, only a steady-state distribution of the heat flux is de
termined. A tonguelike feature of the optimized hear flux distribution
is consistent with the warm SST anomaly at the center of the Yellow S
ea trough. The optimized heat flux generates improved simulation of th
e cooling trend of the temperature time series. The variational method
is the assimilation procedure employed. The developed scheme is able
to optimize simultaneously the initial temperature condition and the s
ea surface heat flux without a priori knowledge of either. A coarse-re
solution Hessian is used to evaluate errors of the assimilation.