Observations of Coastal Upwelling at Ulsan in summer 1997

Low-pass filtered time series of wind, coastal temperature, sea level and current were analyzed to understand the coastal upwelling processes in the southeast coast of Korea. Southerly winds favorable for coastal upwelling were dominant in summer of 1997. Total period of four major wind events amounts to 58 days during one hundred days from June to early September. Coastal temperature is most sensitive to variations of wind. The time lag between the onset of southerly (northerly) winds and decrease (increase) of temperature is 3-18 hours. In the frequency domain the coherent bands have periods of 2.4 and 4.0-5.4 days with respective phase lags of 17 and 27-37 hours. Despite the sensitive response, the magnitude of temperature change is not quantitatively proportional to the intensity or duration of the wind, because it depends on the degree of baroclinic tilting of isotherms built dynamically by the strong Tsushima Warm Current (TWC). Current is particularly strong near the coast and has a large vertical shear during the upwelling periods, which is associated with the baroclinic tilting. Both of current and sea level are poorly coherent with wind or temperature except for the period of 4 days.