Low-Level Atmospheric Jets And Inversions Over The Western Weddell Sea

For four months in the fall and earlywinter of 1992, as Ice Station Weddell (ISW) driftednorthward through the ice-covered western Weddell Sea,ice station personnel profiled the atmosphericboundary layer (ABL) with radiosondes. These showedthat the ABL was virtually always stably stratifiedduring this season: 96% of the soundings found anear-surface inversion layer. Forty-four percent ofthese inversions were surface-based. Eighty percentof the soundings that yielded unambiguous windprofiles showed an atmospheric jet with speeds as highas 14 m s^-1 in a core below an altitude of 425 m. This paper documents the features of these inversionsand low-level jets. Because the inversion statistics,in particular, are like those reported in and aroundthe Arctic Ocean, similar local processes seem tocontrol the ABL over sea ice regions in bothhemispheres. A simple two-layer model, in which anelevated layer becomes frictionally decoupled from thesurface, does well in explaining the ISW jetstatistics. This model also implies a new geostrophicdrag parameterization for sea-ice regions that dependson the magnitude of the geostrophic wind, the 10-mdrag coefficient C_DN10, and the ABL height, butnot explicitly on any stratification parameter.