Scaling Feature of the Ocean Surface Wind Field

The ocean surface wind plays a crucial role in the air-sea exchanges of momentum, heat, and mass, consequently is vital to the controlling of weather and climate. Due to the extremely large range of scales of the motion of the wind field, e.g., flow structures from millimeters to thousands of kilometers, the multiscale dynamics are known to be relevant. In this work, with the help of a Wiener-Khinchine theorem-based Fourier power spectrum estimator, the scaling features of the wind field provided by several satellites, i.e., QuikSCAT, Metop-A, -B, and -C, Haiyang-2B, and China France Oceanography SATellite (CFOSAT), is examined. Power-law scaling behavior is evident in the ranges of 100 to 3000 km with a scaling exponent β varying from 5/3 to 3. The global distributions and seasonal variations of the scaling exponent β have also been considered. The results show that due to the energetic convective activities in the low-latitude zones, the scaling exponents β in these regions are closer to the value of 5/3. As for the mid-latitudes, the values of β are close to 2 and independent of the variation of longitude. Concerning the seasonal variations, for most regions, the scaling exponents measured in winter are larger than those in summer. Furthermore, the seasonal variations of β in low-latitudes are stronger than those in the mid-latitudes. Our preliminary results indicate that all satellites provide a consistent scaling feature of the ocean surface wind field.