A dataset of the wind-driven global ocean circulation for climate research

Abstract

[Abstract]: Some 40 years after Sverdrup (1947) developed his fundamental wind-driven circulation theory, Australian scientist Dr. Stuart Godfrey, advanced it in an elegant and provoking way (Godfrey, 1989). He proposed an “Island Rule” and used it in conjunction with the Sverdrup relationship such that given a set of surface wind-stress field, global wind-driven circulation can be determined. We have applied this Island Rule model to monthly surface wind stress fields from NCEP (Kalnay et al., 1996) reanalysis and ERA40 (Uppala, et al., 2005) reanalysis to generate the wind-driven circulation history in terms of barotropic stream function and steric height. This dataset is now available to serve the global Earth system research community for climate model validation purposes and for description of variations and trends of the wind-driven ocean circulation.