Sea Level Response in the Korea Strait to Typhoons

A shallow water numerical model is established to investigate the response of coastal water in the Korea Strait to typhoons that pass nearby the Korea Strait. Atmospheric pressure and wind by Fujita's formula (1952) and Miyazaki et al. (1961), respectively are used in the model. The model results show an agreement fair with the observation partially, but poor with the amplitude of the sea level variation. In particular, the discrepancy is larger in a typhoon passing through right side than that through left side of the Korea Strait. The model showes that the disagreement between the model and the observation can be caused by numerically unrealistic distributions of armospheric pressure and wind around the strait. In the Korea Strait the isostatic effects in the model were underestimated, whereas the wind fields were overestimated.