Spatio-temporal Distributions of the Wind Stress and the Thermocline in the East Sea of Korea

The wind stress distribution over the East Sea of Korea was obtained from the shipboard observations of the Fisheries Research and Development Agency along the serial observation lines. These monthly and annual mean wind stress distributions were put into the simplified interface model which describes the latitudinal variations of the upper-layer thickness as function of the curl of the wind stress. The observed variations of the surface, zonally averaged winds indeed caused the upper-layer flow convergent and divergent at the latitudes that produced a tone of thick upper-layer or a deep permanent thermocline and the shallower depth with divergence. Thus, the wind field contributes positively to maintain the almost time-independent distribution of the interface of 'saddle like' feature in north-south direction over the study area.