Data · dataset · 2026
Structure of offshore flow
Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research
The horizontal and vertical structure of the mean flow and turbulent fluxes are examined using aircraft observations taken near a barrier island on the east coast of the United States during offshore flow periods.
Description
The spatial structure is strongly influenced by the surface roughness and surface temperature discontinuities at the coast. With offshore flow of warm air over cool water, the sea surface momentum flux is large near the coast and decreases rapidly with increasing offshore distance or travel time.
The decrease is attributed to advection and decay of turbulence from land. The rate of decrease is dependent on the characteristic timescale of the eddies in the upstream land-based boundary layer that are advected over the ocean. As a consequence, the airâsea momentum exchange near the coast is influenced by upstream conditions and similarity theory is not adequate to predict the flux.
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The vertical structure reveals an elevated layer of downward momentum flux and turbulence energy maxima over the ocean. This increase in the momentum flux with height contributes to acceleration of the low-level mean wind. In the momentum budget, the vertical advection term, vertical flux divergence term, and the horizontal pressure gradient term are all of comparable magnitude and all act to balance large horizontal advection.
An interpolation technique is applied to the aircraft data to develop fetchâheight cross sections of the mean flow and momentum flux that are suitable for future verification of numerical models.
Links
Get the data
- Publisher page n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7j38srj ↗
documentation · download · from data ucar edu
Where it is published
- data.ucar.edu /dataset/structure-of-offshore-flow ↗
National Center for Atmospheric Research dataset page
landing page · from data ucar edu
Catalogue records · 1
- CKAN API data.ucar.edu/api/3/action/package_show?id=81adba8a-3e27-4d95-8beb-ed6f3b536… ↗
metadata API · from data ucar edu
Topics
- From keywords
- Earth & Environmental Science · Ocean & Atmospheric Science
- Inferred from text
- Atmospheric sciences 69%
Provenance · 1 source records, 8 field assertions
| Source | Key | Last seen | Raw |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Center for Atmospheric Research | 81adba8a-3e27-4d95-8beb-ed6f3b536c47 | 10 d ago | JSON v1 |
| Field | Assertion | Extractor | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| concepts[field].anzsrc:group:3701 | enrichment · data ucar edu | taxonomy-embedding@1.1.0 | title+keywords+description (69%) |
| concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmental | mapping · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmospheric | mapping · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| created_date | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| description | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | /notes |
| publication_date | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | |
| title | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 | /title |
| updated_date | source · data ucar edu | connector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0 |