Contrasting how the ocean is forced by the atmosphere at the WHOTS and the Stratus Ocean Reference Stations

More than twenty years of air-sea flux observations have been collected at both the WHOTS and Stratus Ocean Reference Stations (ORS).  Both are in trade wind regions, but WHOTS, just north of Oahu, Hawaii is rich in synoptic weather variability including storms, fronts, and cyclones, while Stratus, 1,500 km west of northern Chile and 1,900 km west of the Andes, has little synoptic weather variability.  Time series of surface meteorology at each site are used to prepare time series of the air-sea fluxes of heat, freshwater, and momentum.  Mean daily and annual cycles and the 365-day running mean low-passed times at each site are described and contrasted.  The low-passed time series quantify the interannual variability at the two sites.  After subtracting the long-term mean annual cycle from daily time series to create time series of anomalous interannual variability, the goal is to understand surface forcing contributes to periods of ocean warming and to periods of ocean cooling and to contrast the WHOTS regime's surface forcing by synoptic weather events with the Stratus regime's surface forcing absent synoptic weather variability.  Because one approach to extending this to look over the regions around the ORS might be to use atmospheric reanalyses to provide gridded surface forcing, model time series are extracted at the ORS sites and analyzed in a similar way.  Of interest is whether or not the ERA5, MERRA2, and NCEP2 reanalyses have realistic long-term means, daily and annual cycles, and interannual variability when compared to the ORS observations.