Interconnection between the Southern South China Sea and the Java Sea through the Karimata Strait

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the interconnection between the southern South China Sea (SSCS) and Java Sea (JS) by simulating seasonal circulations and associated transports using the Regional Ocean Modelling System (ROMS). The seasonal circulation was predominantly driven by monsoonal wind stress and water exchanges between the SSCS and the JS. During the boreal winter, cooler and saltier waters from the SSCS were advected into the JS, while during the boreal summer, cooler waters from the JS were advected into the SSCS, with the advection of fresher water onto the Peninsular Malaysia’s east coast in the SSCS being the new finding provided by this study. The various water transports were driven southward into the JS during the boreal winter and northward into the SSCS during the boreal summer. The various water transports estimated by ROMS peaked in May during the inflow months from the JS into the SSCS, which was attributed to the simulated anticyclonic eddy in the SSCS, which differed from previous studies that peaked between June and August. The annual mean volume, freshwater, heat, and salt transports were 0.96 Sv, 0.04 Sv, 0.10 PW, and 0.03 × 109 kg s−1, respectively, directed from the SSCS into the JS.

Identifying Priority Conservation Areas of Largehead Hairtail (Trichiurus japonicus) Nursery Grounds in the East China Sea

“…The CMEMS was used to act as our data for modeling because CMEMS assimilates a number of observation data sources, and previous findings indicated that the data assimilation technique can produce a reliable dataset (Edwards et al, 2015;Martin et al, 2015). Indeed, numerous studies employed the CMEMS to evaluate their observational data or produced ocean model in ECS and South China Sea (Lin et al, 2017;Lee et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2020b;Kok et al, 2021;Wu et al, 2021). Three topographic variables and six oceanographic variables were extracted for each position and date of the survey dataset, all variables were downscaled using a bilinear interpolation to match our fisheries data.…”

Amplitude modulations of seasonal variability in the Karimata Strait throughflow

“…where, T i,k and r i,k represent the average temperature and density of each grid respectively. T 0 is the reference temperature, which is set to 3.72 °C (Fang et al, 2010;Kok et al, 2021), and specific heat capacity C p is 3.89 × 10 3 J kg −1 °C−1 . To accurately calculate the heat transport through the KS, the temperature profile at each station is calculated based on the bottom temperature observed from the TRBMs and the SST remote sensing data.…”

“…For convenience, the two straits are generally referred to as the KS (Wang et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2021). The water is of lower sea surface temperature (SST) and higher sea surface salinity in the southern SCS than that in the JS during boreal winter (hereinafter referred to as winter), and vice versa during boreal summer (hereinafter referred to as summer) (Kok et al, 2021). In winter, the SCS water flows southward through the KS and the JS and ultimately drains into the Indonesian throughflow (ITF) (Fang et al, 2010).…”

“…In winter, the SCS water flows southward through the KS and the JS and ultimately drains into the Indonesian throughflow (ITF) (Fang et al, 2010). Comparing with its direct contribution to ITF transport, it plays a more important role in the seasonal and interannual variations of volume, heat, and fresh water transports because of its features of relatively low salinity and high temperature (Gordon et al, 2003;Tozuka et al, 2007;Tozuka et al, 2009;Kok et al, 2021;Samanta et al, 2021;Purba et al, 2021).…”

“…The interaction between the KSTF and ITF has also been studied using a HYCOM/FVCOM model simulation. It is found that in winter, the low-salinity water from the SCS is transported to Makassar Strait through the KSTF to block the southward ITF, whereas in summer part of the ITF is advected into the SCS through the KS with advection onto the Peninsular Malaysia's east coast (Gordon et al, 2012;Xu and Malanotte-Rizzoli, 2013;Kok et al, 2021), and part of the inflow has a contribution to the deep meridional overturning circulation in the SCS (Shu et al, 2014).…”