Variations of Kuroshio Intrusion and Internal Waves at Southern East China Sea: Observational Study with Lagrangian Float and Mooring ADCPs

Abstract

The PI attended three ONR workshops to discuss and help define the future integrated observational program for the "Quantifying, Predicting and Exploiting Uncertainty (QPEU), more specifically to help formulate an experiment to study the Kuroshio intrusion, nonlinear internal waves (NLIWs), internal tides, inertial waves, and turbulence mixing resulting from the Kuroshio-topography interaction. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate where the Kuroshio and barotropic tides interact with the continental shelf of the East China Sea (ECS) and with one prominent submarine ridge (I-Lan Ridge). The experiment plan proposed by the PI included two components: 1) for the extended observational program, 3 months in the southwest monsoon, deploy an array of six 75-kHZ Long Rangers with thermistor chains; 2) for the 0.5-month intensive observational program on the continental shelf, overlapping with the extended observational program, collaborate with Thomas Sanford to make EM-APEX float observations (see Figure 2).