Low-Level Flows over the GATE Area during Summer 1972

Abstract

An assimilation of satellite low-cloud vector data and conventional meteorological data is presented in this paper. The domain of the study is the GATE A-scale area. The period is the summer months of 1972. Objective analysis of the data for 93 individual days was carried out for this entire domain. One of the important climatological findings of this study is the presence of a velocity maximum in the southeast trades along the Brazilian coast. Mean speeds for three months exceed 10 m/s in this region; daily values occasionally are as large as 25 m/s. Besides showing the monthly mean motion field, we have examined in detail one-level barotropic energy exchanges and fluxes in the GATE A-scale domain. The number of conventional plus non-conventional wind observations are about 400 per day. This is more than has been used in most previous studies. Some of these results of the energetics, especially with regards to the period when Hurricane Agnes formed, are thus of considerable interest.