• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.225-242
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• 2012

This is the first attempt to produce simultaneous surface current field from satellite altimeter data for the entire East Sea and to provide surface current information to users with formal description. It is possible to estimate surface geostrophic current field in near real-time because satellite altimeters and coastal tide gauges supply sea level data for the whole East Sea. Strength and location of the major currents and meso-scale eddies can be identified from the estimated surface geostrophic current field. The mean locations of major surface currents were explicated relative to topographic, ocean-surface and undersea features with schematic representation of surface circulation. In order to demonstrate the practical use of this surface current information, exemplary descriptions of annual, seasonal and monthly mean surface geostrophic current distributions were presented. In order to objectively classify surface circulation patterns in the East Sea, empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis was performed on the estimated 16-year (1993-2008) surface current data. The first mode was associated with intensification or weakening of the East Korea Warm Current (EKWC) flowing northward along the east coast of Korea and of the anti-cyclonic circulation southwest of Yamato Basin. The second mode was associated with meandering paths of the EKWC in the southern East Sea with wavelength of 300 km. The first and second modes had inter-annual variations. The East Sea surface circulation was classified as inertial boundary current pattern, Tsushima Warm Current pattern, meandering pattern, and Offshore Branch pattern by the time coefficient of the first two EOF modes.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2024

For measuring the performance of passive sonars, we usually consider the maximum Detection Range (DR) under the environment and system parameters in operation. In shallow water, where sound waves inevitably interacts with sea surface or bottom, detection generally maintains up to the maximum range. In deep water, however, sound waves may not interact with sea surface or/and bottom, and thus there may exist shadow zones where sound waves can hardly reach. In this situation, DR alone may not completely define the performance of each sonar. For complete description of sonar performance, we employ the concept 'Robustness Of Detection (ROD)'. In the coastal region of the East Sea, the spatial variations of water masses have close relations with DR and ROD, where the two parameters show reverse spatial variations in general. The spatial and temporal analysis of the temperature by employing the Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) shows that the 1-st mode represents typical pattern of seasonal variation and the 2-nd mode represents strength variations of mixed layers and currents. The two modes are estimated to explain about 92 % of the variations. Assuming two types of targets located at the depths of 5 m (shallow) and 100 m (deep), the passive sonar performance (DR) gives high negative correlations (about -0.9) with the first two modes. Most of temporal variations of temperature occur from the surface up to 200 m in the water column so that when we assume a target at 100 m, we can expect detection performance of little seasonal variations with passive sonars below 100 m.