• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.409-419
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• 2011

Semi-diurnal internal tides and near-inertial waves are investigated using moored current meter measurements at four sites along the shelf break of the East China Sea during August 1987 and May-June 1988. Each mooring is equipped with four current meters spanning from near surface to near bottom. Spectral analyses of all current data reveal dominant spectra at the semi-diurnal frequency band, where the upper and lower current measurements show out-of-phase relationship between them with significant coherences. These are consistent with typical characteristics of the first-mode semi-diurnal internal tide. Strong intensification of the near-bottom baroclinic currents is observed only at one site, where the ratio of the bottom slope to the slope of the internal-wave characteristics at the semi-diurnal frequency is close to unity. An energetic near-inertial wave event is observed during the first half of May-June 1988 observation at two mooring sites. Rotary spectra reveal that the most dominant signal is clockwise rotating motion at the near-inertial frequency band. Upward phase and downward energy propagations, shown in time-depth contour plots of near-inertial bandpass filtered currents, are confirmed by cross correlations between the upper- and lower-layer current measurements. The upward-propagating phase speed is estimated to be about 0.13 cm $s^{-1}$ at both sites. Significant coherences and in-phase relationships of near-inertial currents at the same or similar depths between the two sites are observed in spite of their long distance of about 110 km.

• 한국해양학회지
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.133-143
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• 1991

A new internal tide model for solving flow fields and wave generations is presented here which seems to be simple to apply, converges fast and yields accurate results. The new method employs a representation of vertical structure using dynamic basis functions which depend on the stratifications. The present method has been applied to the East Sea. For a constant Brunt-Vaisala case, weak baroclinic currents are generated over the entire continertal slop: however, results using a more realistic stratification can be described using only the lowest modes and exhibit much more realistic behavior. Baroclinic tide generation is confined to the upper slope. Model results for the East sea show the semi-diurnal baroclinic modes contain almost all the energy transferred from the barotropic mode.