Short-term sea-surface temperature response to wind stress in the Tropical Pacific: Sensitivity to vertical mixing parameterization and wind forcing

Uncertainty in wind forcing has long hampered direct tests of ocean model output against observations for the purpose of refining the K-Profile Parameterization (KPP) of oceanic vertical mixing. To examine whether the quality of observations and updated wind reanalysis products is sufficient to overcome the uncertainty problem, a network of buoy observational data is compared against output from a perturbed-parameter ensemble of an ocean general circulation model using multiple wind forcing products. The lagged correlation between wind stress and sea surface temperature (with the diurnal cycle removed from both) is used as a measure of model-data misfit. The correlation statistic is indicative of how the vertical mixing parameterization responds to wind-driven forcing. Sensitivity to certain KPP parameters is on the same order as sensitivity to wind product.