Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 10 Issue 02

View Issue TOC
Volume 10, No. 2
Pages 60 - 63

OpenAccess

Internal Wave-Driven Surface Currents From HF Radar

By Lynn K. Shay  
Jump to
Citation Copyright & Usage
First Paragraph

Surface current observations from high-frequency (HF) radar have revealed that not only are the low-frequency and tidal currents resolved by the measurement, higher-frequency motions are also contained within the signals. These higher frequency current oscillations are within the internal wave continuum from the buoyancy to the inertial frequencies, including the excitation of semidiurnal internal tides forced by a barotropic tide propagating over the shelf-break (Baines, 1986: Paduan and Cook, 1997). Another complicating feature in the coastal regime is oceanic frontal structure that significantly influences internal wave variability because of the background vorticity fields (Mooers, 1975: Kunze, 1985). However, little is known about the internal wave interactions with coastal ocean fronts where these vorticities may be considerably larger than in the deep ocean because of the larger density contrast between the water masses. Synoptic observations of the horizontal flow structure from HF radar provides the spatial context for moored and shipbased measurements to assess the impact of coastal fronts on the internal wave climate.

Citation

Shay, L.K. 1997. Internal wave-driven surface currents from HF radar. Oceanography 10(2):60–63, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1997.24.

Copyright & Usage

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.