CoAuthors

Yves Quilfen (IFREMER, France); Bertrand Chapron (IFREMER, France); Alexis Mouche (IFREMER, France)

Tropical Cyclones (TCs) are extreme atmospheric events fed by the warm waters of tropical basins. The wind stress and curl are generating a bunch of severe disturbances: surface waves, inertial currents, induced turbulent mixing leading to thermocline erosion and thermal anomalies (cold wake & subsurface warm anomalies).Combining an unprecedented constellation of satellite-born sensors with an analytical two layers model, our study aims to depict those mechanisms and discuss the scales of this TCs induced oceanic variability. First, a new parametric wind stress model was derived using the unique capability of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, to obtain a reliable modeling of key forcing parameters. Besides the well depicted cold wake signature in sea surface temperature, the oceanic response is further analysed in term of sea level anomaly(SLA) by using the full potential of the altimetry fleet, as SLA is a good marker of the TCs ocean dynamics, containing both flux components (Ekman transport) and steric changes in its signature. The Argo profiles add valuable information for a better description of the mixed layer dynamics.This framework will bring a renewed climatological point of view on the heat balance and re-stratification mechanisms in TCs wake.