Regional Air-Sea interactions (RASI) climatology for central america coastal gap wind and upwelling events

Coastal gap wind jets and associated ocean upwelling events present significant regional Air-Sea interaction over the eastern Pacific warm pool. Besides the regional weather impact, the ocean upwelling events also significantly change the nutrient distribution over the area by bringing up deep cold water and nutrients to the ocean surface. These events are therefore of interest to both research and commercial users. In this paper, we present automated algorithms to extract gap wind and upwelling events from satellite-derived data products. An ocean upwelling event is characterized by a sudden and significant decrease in sea surface temperature (SST). This study focuses on three special locations: the Gulf of Tehuantepec, Gulf of Papagayo and Gulf of Panama, where gap wind events are often observed during northern hemisphere winter months. The information acquired from this automated detection is collected and managed by the Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC), a NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), located in Huntsville, AL, and is made publicly available to users.