Surface Winds from Tropical Pacific Islands—Climatological Statistics

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Abstract
Multidecadal time series of surface wind observations from tropical Pacific islands have been examined in order to investigate the space and time scales of variability. Climatological monthly means and variances are compared with comparable means and variances derived from ship observations; usually the means agree to within ∼1 m s−1 in speed and ∼10 degrees in direction. Annual and semiannual cycles differ in detail. Island zonal wind variances are often significantly larger, by up to 10 m2 s−2 near the equator between September and December; because of the spatial coherence of the island results, these discrepancies are believed to result from the poor high-frequency sampling typical of ship data. A substantial near-equatorial zonal wind variance maximum is shown to be related to ENSO period variability; excluding ENSO time periods leaves a relatively spatially uniform variance of ∼5 m2 s−2 over a broad region. The frequency distribution of variance, derived from daily-averaged data, exhibits c... Abstract Multidecadal time series of surface wind observations from tropical Pacific islands have been examined in order to investigate the space and time scales of variability. Climatological monthly means and variances are compared with comparable means and variances derived from ship observations; usually the means agree to within ∼1 m s−1 in speed and ∼10 degrees in direction. Annual and semiannual cycles differ in detail. Island zonal wind variances are often significantly larger, by up to 10 m2 s−2 near the equator between September and December; because of the spatial coherence of the island results, these discrepancies are believed to result from the poor high-frequency sampling typical of ship data. A substantial near-equatorial zonal wind variance maximum is shown to be related to ENSO period variability; excluding ENSO time periods leaves a relatively spatially uniform variance of ∼5 m2 s−2 over a broad region. The frequency distribution of variance, derived from daily-averaged data, exhibits c...

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