Atmospheric and oceanic vortex streets: observations by satellite radars

摘要

The surface imprints of the atmospheric and oceanic vortex streets were revealed in the vicinity of islands on the radar images of the northwestern Pacific Ocean. The images were obtained by a X-band side looking real aperture radar (RAR) from Okean series satellites and a S-band synthetic aperture radar from ERS-1 and ERS-2. A broad swath width (460 km) and a spatial resolution of 1-2 km of the RAR allow to estimate the parameters of the atmospheric vortices and trace vortex street evolution both bownstream and in time using a sequence of the NOAA and Meteor visible and IR images. A comparison of the visible/IR images with radar ones have shown that the sharp gradients of the surface winds were observed near boundary of cloud vortices. The detailed structure of the oceanic vortices and vortex streets formed by the Kuroshio and also tidal currents was revealed with the ERS SAR images.